Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Nubya Garcia doesn’t want to talk on the dance floor. “If we’re at a sound system and it’s dub and reggae, if I’m at a club or I’m at a gig, I don’t mind a couple words here and there or a sentence but I am not having a deep meaningful chat with you,” the saxophonist says with a hearty laugh. “Let yourself be there and listen.”Garcia hopes to bring back the art of collective listening with the release of her second album, Odyssey, in September. The album will also be played as part of an “immersive audio experience” in a central London space, along with a film showing behind-the-scenes imagery from the album’s creation. That means starting from the first track and exploring how the tension rises and falls in the room, ideally reaching a state of euphoria. “I’ve obviously heard the record a million times. I’ve mixed it, mastered it and written the thing, but it sounds different in every single room,” she says. “You pick up on different things. The way that someone sways or has their eyes closed reaches someone else.”At the All Points East festival in east London earlier in the month, Garcia’s presence transformed the music too: commanding the sun-saturated stage in a glistening earth-toned dress, she flicked her long blonde hair out of the way to play powerful, dub-inflected jazz harmonies on her saxophone. Garcia started with the title track of her debut album, Source — a love letter to sound-system culture, calypso and soca — before a medley that built up to the energy of “Triumphance”, which closes her new album.“There’s a joy in knowing when you’re performing, it’s never going to be like that again,” says Garcia at a studio in Kentish Town after the performance. “There’s a freedom in being able to fully let go.”In recent years, London’s buzzy young jazz scene has exploded. Musicians have gained mainstream traction at home and abroad for their blend of hip-hop, cumbia, dancehall, Afrobeat and highlife with jazz. Today’s sound draws on music from Africa and the Caribbean, as much as London itself. For Garcia, who grew up in a music-loving household in Camden with her Guyanese mother and British-Trinidadian father, it has meant drawing on the classical music her mum played, “which wasn’t my bag then but it is now”, as well as dub, reggae, funk, soul and Cuban music.Her parents encouraged her to learn the violin at the age of three, and she soon took an interest in the piano and the clarinet her sister played. But the saxophone stole her heart at age 10. “It feels like the easiest and clearest way that I want to communicate musically,” she says. Around that time, Garcia began taking courses at Camden’s Roundhouse music venue and with the publicly funded Camden Music Service, which helped get her first show at the Jazz Cafe when she was 12. Camden was “a really eclectic space” to come of age. She attended a plethora of gigs that helped her appreciate a wide spectrum of sounds: “It allows you to really imagine yourself as anything.”It is this sense of limitlessness that Garcia hopes people will experience when they’re listening to Odyssey. “I want them to feel like they can dream, I want them to feel like their imagination knows no bounds and that whatever part of their journey they’re on or within, that it can have as many twists and turns or yeses and nos. It doesn’t mean that will stop them from continuing the journey.”Four years after Source, which was nominated for the Mercury Prize and drew on the sounds of Garcia’s childhood, Odyssey is all about growth and discipline. It feels more melancholy and spiritual, tugging at the heartstrings with big beats and vast orchestral compositions. On the record, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter esperanza spalding writes haunting vocals to “Dawn”, where she reflects on the story of Icarus, while Georgia Anne Muldrow soulfully croons about hope, purpose and dedication on the reverent “We Walk in Gold”.British singer-songwriter Richie Seivwright, who rose to prominence playing trombone for the jazz collective Kokoroko, adds buttery neo-soul. Garcia and Seivwright met through mentorship programme Tomorrow’s Warriors, like many of the scene’s most prolific musicians: Moses Boyd, Theon Cross, the original line-up of Kokoroko and Ezra Collective. “I’d never been in a place playing music with that many Black young people,” she says. “I felt at ease immediately.”One of the core tenets of Tomorrow’s Warriors was to create a safe space for female instrumentalists to thrive. The big, all-female jazz group Nérija, which Garcia was a part of, was born from these sessions. But the mixed jams were just as important for building Garcia’s jazz community: she has known her drummer Sam Jones since he was 14, her bassist Daniel Casimir a little later, and Joe Armon-Jones has played keys with her on and off since they were teens.Garcia is thankful for all the opportunities she had as “a bursary kid” in the early 2000s: from the Roundhouse offering courses for £2 to Tomorrow’s Warriors, which was free of charge. But the saxophonist points to the cuts in funding over the past decade and thinks now “it’s completely different”. She taught classes at the Camden Music Service in her last year of university and says that “To see the real, tangible difference in resources was really sad.” Whereas lessons used to be one-on-one, they were being taught in groups with too few instruments to go round.Despite the growth of jazz, London has become a more difficult place for musicians, says the Music Venue Trust: from the cost of living crisis to noise complaints and post-pandemic hangover, gig venues closed at a rate of two a week nationally in 2023. Now, when musicians come to London and ask what’s happening after the gig, “What can we say?” says Garcia. All the venues have shut. “This is the sleepiest, early city.”“People need, want, love culture,” she adds. “Music accompanies most parts of people’s day and people’s lives. You wouldn’t have a quiet wedding or a quiet funeral. You wouldn’t have a quiet party. But our relationship to it has changed, and somewhere along the way, people started to value it differently.” That itself needs to change, she says. “I truly do believe that music is for everyone, and that includes, hopefully, what I do.”‘Odyssey’ is released on September 20 by Concord Jazz and can be heard at KEF Music Gallery, London, September 20-28, uk.kef.com. Nubya Garcia performs on September 19 at the ICA, London, ica.art
