Image via Danika Lawrence
Will Schube still can’t believe Larry David got Salman Rushdie to say ‘fatwa sex’ on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Nubya Garcia is always brimming with ideas. The British jazz saxophonist’s new album, Odyssey overflows with creative riffs, surprising chord changes, and sonic revolutions but never sinks under the weight of Garcia’s ambition. It’s both restrained and a burst of firecrackers lighting up the night sky. She walks a tightrope without breaking a sweat, backed by a world class band that effortlessly switches between written and improvised music.
“I wanted this album to be epic,” Garcia explains over Zoom. “The things that I was writing had an energy to them that had a larger than life feel. I needed to follow that.”
Garcia was born in England to a Guyanese mother and Trinidadian father. She first came to notoriety thanks to Gilles Peterson’s 2018 London jazz compilation We Out Here, which was curated by the movement’s shining light, Shabaka Hutchings. The compilation didn’t introduce Garcia, but helped illustrate the ways in which she was helping to define the city’s new sound.
More acclaim arrived on the heels of Garcia’s phenomenal debut LP, 2020’s Source, which imagined jazz through various lenses from cumbia to dub to salsa. On that record, she examined the influences of her Guyanese background from the perspective of a classically trained jazz musician – infusing her compositions with Latin and African rhythms. As Kamasi Washington helped redefine West Coast jazz, so did Garcia in the UK. Source seemed to say: look at all the things that jazz can be.
Of course, you can only break the rules once you’ve learned them, and Garcia’s education has been integral. While much of what she does is defined by her eagerness to improvise, an equal weight should be given to the craft and techniques honed at a number of highly acclaimed institutions. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music, earned a summer scholarship at Berklee College of Music, and graduated (with honors) from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.
But not everything on Odyssey is studied. Its unpredictability — the way she balances composition with improvisation — combines her schooling and deep love for the history of jazz. In fact, it was secondhand advice from a legendary practitioner of the genre, Sun Ra, that actually led her to begin writing Odyssey. “Someone told me, or I read somewhere, that Sun Ra created every day or wrote something for the creator every day,” Garcia says. “That stayed with me, and I have never let it go.”
During our conversation, she continuously describes the LP as “epic” and “cinematic,” which, while factual, doesn’t quite capture the complexity and energy that courses through these songs. Her band, which includes Joe Armon-Jones (keys), Daniel Casimir (bass), and Sam Jones (drums), places a premium on dynamism. Garcia’s celestial levitations never float too far off thanks to the band’s hard-charging, more traditional jazz instrumentals, funk workouts, and string-led suites.
Garcia only truly began writing Odyssey when she freed herself from the expectations that came with following up Source. This sabbatical — brought about by a case of burnout — allowed her to contextualize her career less as a summation of songs and albums than as a compendium of her interests. Odyssey is the album that she saw each morning when she woke and began writing. It didn’t matter what she came up with, only that she was doing it. Often, this freedom led to some of her boldest ideas to date (only some of which ended up on Odyssey). This process is a reflection of a bell hooks quote she continually returned to while writing and recording: “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is — it’s to imagine what is possible.”
Odyssey is certainly an epic, but it’s also an intimate portrait. Garcia can paint the sky or capture a still life of an ant. Often, she does both at once. After Source, she thought she may have lost her ability to define the difference. Exhaustion ensued, but the rest it forced led to a realization that eventually informed Odyssey: As she explains: “I needed to be in a dreamlike wonder again. I needed to have time to daydream.”