Nubya Garcia is one of the breakthrough international stars of the recent UK jazz boom. The 33-year-old London-born tenor saxophonist, composer and bandleader, whose mother is from Guyana and father from Trinidad, is another gifted graduate of the inspirational jazz-education organisation Tomorrow’s Warriors: her debut album, Source, from 2020, was nominated for the Mercury Prize, and she has since toured the world to considerable acclaim. Garcia has also guested on albums by some of her key contemporaries, including Ezra Collective, Moses Boyd, Sons of Kemet and Nala Sinephro.
For Garcia’s second full-length album she retains the tight core quartet of Joe Armon-Jones on keyboards, Daniel Casimir on double bass and Sam Jones on drums, and skilfully synthesises another exhilarating mix of jazz, reggae, dub, neosoul and R&B. On seven of the 12 tracks, Garcia, who grew up playing violin, viola and piano, also showcases her arrangements for a 12-piece string section from the Chineke! Orchestra, “the first professional orchestra in Europe comprised of majority black and ethnically diverse musicians”.
The result is multilayered and carefully crafted music that feels at once epic, expansive and like a significant step forward – an impressively mature and individual work that, as Garcia explains, “represents the notion of truly being on your own path”.
Not only is she a refreshingly unhurried and unshowy improviser with an authoritative and compositional approach to building a solo, but Garcia also writes strong, hummable, rhythmically rich melodies that stay with you. Odyssey’s easy-going opener, Dawn, is a catchy breeze of a song in which Garcia’s sinewy saxophone deftly doubles with the honeyed vocals of the American bassist and composer Esperanza Spalding, while We Walk in Gold, which features the Los Angeles soul-jazz singer Georgia Anne Muldrow, sounds so strikingly cinematic that it could be the theme tune for a future James Bond film.
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The record closes with the exultant melody, dub bass lines, vocal harmonies and motivational lyrics, spoken by Garcia herself, of Triumphance, a portmanteau word that, I’m assuming, combines “triumphant” and “brilliance”. As an encapsulation of the whole album, it’s pretty much perfect.
