What Nubya Garcia Brought
Nubya Garcia
Episode:Tomatoes and Retirement
Born in London. Guyanese mother, Trinidadian-British father. Nubya Garcia's tenor saxophone carries Caribbean rhythm, London club culture, and jazz improvisation all at once. These three tracks are Garcia playing under her own name, Garcia called into someone else's session, and Garcia four years later having arrived somewhere new.
The title track of the debut album. 12 minutes. Tenor saxophone and horn section layer together, a dubstep bassline churns, reggae rhythm shakes the ground. uses "Source" to mean "roots" — the place you come from and return to. In the second half of the piece, the horn section repeats the same phrase while the heat slowly rises. Music that smells of earth.
A session recorded at the Total Refreshment Centre in London — the London Side. participates here on tenor. The Garcia who spent 12 minutes building her own world on Source plays more compact and sharp under McCraven's editorship. In the process of McCraven cutting and reconstructing the recorded material afterward, Garcia's improvisation is cut into a different shape. The person who assembles it herself on her own album becomes the one who offers the material on someone else's.
The second album, four years after Source. This piece is built on a melody wrote during a six-week stay in Brazil, watching the sunrise from the beach every morning. With 's voice added, a different kind of air flows — open rather than earthy like Source. London → Chicago (the work with McCraven) → Brazil. Each time the place changes, Garcia's sound changes with it. But the fatness at the core of the tenor stays the same throughout.
