Nubya Garcia’s return to the UK at Cheltenham after a two-month American tour supporting her new album Osyssey saw her at the top of her game in a set that was both uncompromisingly visceral and a deeply personal appeal to our shared humanity.
She’s been a conspicuously bright light since her very first EP releases in 2017, and 2020’s debut album Source was nominated for a Mercury. Her new and third solo album Odyssey is a sprawling blend of orchestral arrangements, RnB, jazz, broken beat and dub, produced with the wizard Kwes, with high profile guest spots from Esperanza Spalding and Georgia Anne Muldrow. At the end of the band’s first headline tour and with this material and with these spurs to her development it’s easily the best I’ve seen her. (I wasn’t sold on that Royal Albert Hall Prom concert in 2021 at all).
She swaggers on stage looking like a superstar, in black with a blond and black crimped bowl and shades, wielding that gorgeous tenor saxophone from Oldroyd-Walker (British design made in Czech Republic). Sam Jones on drums reprises his album role, with Max Luthert on bass after Daniel Casimir. Lyle Barton on keys brings a sparkling chordal world beyond sevenths, ninths, elevenths, thirteens, infinities, that makes for rich ear candy on top of these thick monster grooves. The bass is heavy and locked in intensely with the busy drumming styled after the computer-framed beats of drum n bass and electronic music but played live with engaging virtuosity.
Nubya Garcia has an unusually rich vocabulary in soloing such that her style doesn’t depend on extended techniques or grandstanding to shine. Her embouchure is now seemingly perfected, with a beautiful sound that retains its bite. One particular purple note in one of the crucial solo sax spots really changed the mood in the room. The hall snapped to attention like the comfort zone had been broken. Now everyone was really listening, silently listening to the solo saxophone in the cavernous room. As she noted later, “You lot are so quiet, it’s amazing.” But it was all there in her playing. With the greatest respect to everyone on stage, and they’re amazing, even here there’s a slight sense, common to many situations with just one horn player, that when she puts the sax down you kind of feel like you can take a break before engaging again; aware of the need to maintain respect during a dementedly good drum feature.
“Dawn” starts the album and introduces the ‘sound world’ of the album. It’s an intense dubby workout, and seemed like a surprisingly uncompromising live opener for such a gregarious act to launch into with such a sound-based piece in such a fierce way. The boomy room of Cheltenham Town Hall made it more intense too, uncompromising at first and a bit tough. In a fascinating margin note, she broke off to ask them to turn the onstage haze off, as she said she was “fighting for my life” because the haze had a tendency to make the saxophone pads get sticky. You know how it is. Fighting throughout more generally, it could be pretty full on and locked in; maybe it would be easier to take advice from the classic fusion style in using more breakdowns, synchronised runs, and space.
“The Seer” started innocently with a piano intro. Nubya lit a joss stick. But soon the tune was an absolute bash, totally bosh. She did say it is “about how you feel music in your body.” There was a lot of that as she became more voluble through the set. “You feel it as well,” she said to the standing, not much dancing, audience. “It’s important to let yourself go. They’re all facing this way and in darkness. I hope your inhibitions go. This space is for you.”
Max Luthert’s bass solo stayed low and funky with the drums, adhering to what I call ‘MC prosody’: an emphasis on rhythm, rhythmic complication and variation with a reduced harmonic palette to mimic the limited register of spoken word and the necessary emphasis that restriction places on rhythmic and timbral creativity to compensate. Shabaka Hutchings was the king of this, Nubya had inherited it but uses it sparingly, and now it’s come back to bass-ics, which makes sense: indicating the falling out of fashion of the Pastorius-Patitucci model of playing every note on the neck, maybe with another bass player to actually hold down basslines. Last person I saw doing that was Thundercat.
“Water’s Path” is the only track on the record with no saxophone or band, just strings. The live arrangement is a bit of a loop exercise that brought a bit of a lull. But, after a solo spot, the band blasted back in with all the pedal note bass and Tyner piano, and it was incendiary. It was so heavy that half of the front row had to leave. I mean it was 10.05pm so it could be trains, but not a total coincidence. Introducing a compelling reggae feel as she introduced the band again for what she lied would be a short one, they closed with the title track “Odyssey”. She proclaimed “This is dance music!”, adding “Don’t be shy!”
These importunements to dancing and personal contact came very late. She was right when she said this would have come better at the start, since the show started quite fierce. It made me think the set could have been more fun to lose the first twenty minutes and start with something like this instead of cramming it in at the end. Her spoken word reading of the lyrics to “Odyssey” was touching, and sweetly rounded out the gig’s odyssey. Statements like “We have one life and we should live it in every way possible” might seem a bit vapid, but “Cheltenham! Your journey is yours” would make nice signage at the mainline rail station and the festival. Joking apart, I wholeheartedly admire and adhere to this one: “Dream! Love! Your difference is your power!”
