Nubya Garcia all set for Cork Jazz Festival debut 

It’s fair to say that the UK jazz scene has never felt so vibrant and at the forefront of an exciting new generation of young artists is Nubya Garcia. It’s clear from speaking with her that she’s not only drawing inspiration from her peers in the scene, whose success she celebrates joyfully, and the great history of jazz – and specifically black British pioneers of the form – but also the eclectic broth of contemporary urban London sounds.

In drawing from a rich well of musical and cultural influences, I ask the saxophonist what she thinks is the special ingredient in her sound. She gives the idea careful consideration before deciding: “I think the mix of jazz and dub for me shouldn’t meet, but they do. And then also, as in sonically, I think everything should meet musically because it’s just music at the end of the day. There’s twelve notes. If you want to get into chord tones that’s a whole different thing. But it’s all of the same root for me. What I hear between garage and dub and R ‘n’ B and jungle and all the things that are very particular to UK dance music and bass upwards kind of music. Which is a particular thing. It all stems from reggae and dub.”

Caribbean musics like soca and calypso are also precious to her.

“My goal is to not make genres of music feel separate, because they’re not,” she declares.

I tell her I think jazz and dub should meet more often, and she laughs approvingly. Perhaps the most obvious melding of those worlds can be found on Odyssey’s closing track, “Triumphance.” Remarkably, it’s the first song Garcia wrote lyrics for, which she delivers in spoken word style. She had someone else in mind to toast over the music, someone she admired, but didn’t know. As the deadline crept up and no response was forthcoming from this artist, Garcia’s producer, Kwes, suggested she do it. She was in Brazil at the time, finishing the record, while he was in London mixing it

She relates the back and forth between the pair across different time zones. “I was like, I’ve never done this before. That’s insane. And he was like, no. You should have a go. He was like, just try it.

“And so, I just wrote something in one go and because it was the last one on the record it was a really beautiful way of summing up the energy that I’d been feeling and putting it all together. And I think it cements the record and puts it into that story. So, I wrote it in one go. Didn’t really edit it, which I think is the key, and then I recorded it at 2am and that is what’s on the record.”

Garcia’s declaration that everything should meet musically is something that is evident in her journey to date. Having began her life in music playing violin and viola (instruments she didn’t particularly enjoy) one can hear the classical world intrude on both the title track of her current album Odyssey and “Water’s Track”. Been given a saxophone at 10 years old by her mother sparked her love affair with music. At 16, she became part of the jazz music education and artist development organisation Tomorrow’s Warriors, and she describes this time as being foundational. It’s here she met like-minded musicians like tuba player Theon Cross and drummer Moses Boyd, with whom she formed a trio.

“That was a huge, huge upbringing for me,” she insists. “First of all, there’s three of us onstage. There’s a hell of a lot of playing. We have the same kind of cross sections of life. We’re all Caribbean. We’ve all grown up in London. We have all grown up playing jazz. We all love other styles of music, and that came out in his writing. That came out in how we approached it as well.

“Yeah, that band is one of the bands where I cut my teeth with two fine, fine musicians who were my friends. It meant a lot. And I think about that often, and how beautiful and amazing it was before anything happened. We were doing gigs in the corner of a pub, and it felt amazing and people were up and dancing. Those are the times that we could never have envisioned where we’d be playing now.”

From there, were groups that put Garcia on the map, like Nerija and Maisha, but it seems like all the experiences she has had as a musician hold a special place for her.

“It was a really beautiful thing to be around lots of musicians who weren’t afraid to love and openly love and play other styles of music,” she imparts.

The way Garcia speaks so beautifully and passionately about jazz, prompts me to ask a rather gauche question, and the response proves rewarding.

“Mmm. Ah, Ok, 11 o’clock on a Thursday, what makes jazz so great?” she explodes with laughter, before delivering zinger after zinger. Much like her sax solos!

“I think for me, personally, it can give you a place, it gives you a voice. It allows you to strive for excellence and it also allows you to be held in softness. It’s expansive. And in a very relatively short history for music, in its form you’ve got 120-ish years of known stuff, and I think to see an artform have expanded so rapidly and to see humans who have pushed themselves to the brink to achieve that excellence.

“You can’t pretend to be good at jazz. There’s a lot of other things you can get by on, but you cannot pretend to handle what’s going on in this artform in different ways. It’s a place of honesty, one of the very few places of honesty we have in black music, in that way. There are other ways that I don’t know because I am not in other versions of music. Music can be applied to everything that I’ve said. I’m speaking from the point of view of someone who’s grown up playing jazz and has listened to it since I was in the womb.

“So, for me it’s an important place of expression in a world that doesn’t allow that for a lot of people. And it’s a deep, deep history. For me it’s a place where black people have excelled and changed and been at the forefront of that change and that art, and that is something that I will continue to celebrate and continue to push its history, its legacy.”

While her only previous Irish gig was in Dublin, this won’t be Garcia’s first visit to Cork. She had spent two weeks in Kinsale when she was 13 as part of an annual summer activity she did as a teenager called Forest Cool Camps, where they would decamp to different locations mostly around the UK.

“It was absolutely stunning,” she recalls. “That was one of my favourites, because I did it every single year from 8 to 18. I just remember everyone was so lovely. Everyone was so friendly. We’d go on these long hikes and long walks. I just remember the countryside being incredibly beautiful and the energy was good there. It felt really good.”

• Nubya Garcia plays The Everyman on Sunday, October 26. Doors 9.45pm.