Cork Jazz Festival: UK star Nubya Garcia on Camden, and the melting pot that spawned her sound
Nubya Garcia plays the Everyman for the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival.
Jazz is the music of freedom and possibility – or at least that’s how it sounded to Mercury-nominated saxophonist Nubya Garcia when she was growing up in London’s trendy neighbourhood of Camden. She remembers jazz feeling like an entirely different universe compared to her life playing viola in the London Schools Symphony Orchestra. It was a portal to new worlds, new sounds, a new sense of the person she could be.
“I started the saxophone at 10. And then I found that instrument opened me up to more genres than classical music,” she says. “So that was where I found myself on the journey. And being from Camden means that I saw lots of different types of people in one space, and that was one of the biggest lessons I could have learned. I heard loads of different music coming out of loads of different types of venues. And that's a blessing. I realised that my normal is nowhere near a lot of normals at age 10.”
Garcia’s playing inhabits a fascinating slipstream where jazz serves as a gateway to a multitude of soundscapes. Both accessible and adventurous, and fuelled by her virtuosic saxophone, her music showcases all that is great about the milieu in 2025 – as Guinness Cork Jazz Festival audiences will discover when she plays the city’s Everyman on October 26.
The focus of the performance will be her extraordinary 2024 album, The follow-up to her 2020 breakout, – shortlisted for that year’s Mercury Prize – has been widely praised as one of the best jazz records of last year. Pitchfork heralded it as “wild and expansive”; Jazzwise described the project as “pulsating” and full of “melodic beauty”.
As these superlatives confirm, it is a powerful showcase for her evocative saxophone. Yet for all its seeming effortlessness, the LP was born out of struggle and heartache. Determined not to repeat herself, she moved away from the more minimalist sound of by bringing in new string arrangements to her repertoire. It was a gamble, but one that paid off.
“With any artistic kind of endeavour you want to be intentional,” she says. “So I was intentional about not making the same record twice. I enjoyed the fact that I spent a lot of time writing, and then I got to a place that felt still like me, but very much moved on and expanded from where I was five, six years ago with And I'm proud of that journey. It's a good thing to remember that these things can take the time that they need to take. The journey is going to be what the journey is. That's the whole point of making something – to make it. It's not about the after. It's about the journey.”
There is no shortage of great female jazz artists – features cameos from Grammy-nominated Esperanza Spalding and vocalist Georgia Anne Muldrow. Yet they remain in a minority, and Garcia is conscious that her gender puts her in the spotlight for better or worse. She understands the importance of representation - but is wary of being seen as nothing more than a symbol.
“I would say it's the default,” she says of the historic dominance of male jazz artists.
”Now, I think in history, people don’t realise that women have occupied many spaces at many times. They haven’t been included in the literature. And that’s the stuff that stands once people are gone. So I think it's important to be part of the representation. It would be nice some days to exist as a person rather than a representative.”
Garcia was born in 1991, the youngest of four siblings. Her mother, from Guyana, worked as a civil servant while her British-Trinidadian father was a filmmaker. As a child she attended the Camden Saturday Music Centre where she learned violin and viola. She discovered jazz at age 10, and was tutored by jazz bassist Gary Crosby.
She grew up in Camden in the early 2000s at a time when the London borough was an epicentre of the music industry. The local pubs and clubs were the habitué of bands such as Pete Doherty’s The Libertines. Amy Winehouse lived locally and could be seen pottering around in her distinctive beehive.
“Just walking through Camden and I'm bumping into whoever. There's a gig on at this place. That’s my normal, and that’s a beautiful thing to look back on,” she says of her childhood.
“What it did for me was show me that there was an option and a chance to be a musician in multiple levels. You've got your punk, you have your people trying to sell their mix tapes on the road. You’ve got lots of different kinds of venues. You’ve got soul singers, r&b singers. You’ve got indie bands. So much space for everyone. That's what it taught me. Everyone can coexist if they choose to. I think people stopped choosing to.”
But she feels that Camden has lost its soul in recent years. Many of the older businesses have shut down. People who grew up there are increasingly priced out. As with much of London, it has become a playground for the privileged.
“In terms of energy, it’s changed. Camden market has changed. People who were there for 20, 30 years have been pushed out because of the stupid rent hikes. I don’t live there anymore. I got absolutely priced out. People who go out there can’t live there – they are living in London, and growing up in London and moving further and further and out and stuff. But I have a lot of amazing memories for people that I met and knew for 10,20, years, while I was growing up there. And also hearing stories about people of my parents’ age. What Camden represents for me is that anything is possible.”
There is a theory that music streaming services such as Spotify have been a gift to jazz. The idea is that it has opened up the genre to a new, younger audience which might have been too intimidated to visit a jazz store. Garcia feels otherwise—and says that the negative impact streaming has had on artists’ revenues is the real story.
“You need over 500,000 streams a month to get minimum wage. Disgusting. And everyone kind of ignores it. I don’t rate [streaming] at all in a monetary aspect, I think it’s stealing. It’s a positive thing to have new people find music and dig online. But I also think that maybe that would exist if you had people going to record stores. You could still go into the shop every week and be like, ‘Yo, what you got for me?’ And they'd be like, ‘You know what? You might like this, or you've never listened to this and anything like this before, but I think you should try it. This is what's playing right now in the store’. That's how you used to find stuff.”
When was nominated for the Mercury in 2021, jazz albums were still regarded as a token presence on the Mercury shortlist. That all changed two years when fellow Londoners Ezra Collective triumphed. Garcia hopes that victory has brought to an end the sense that jazz was only ever on the list because the judges felt the need to tick a box.
“It was a beautiful achievement that has been a long time coming. It proved that music speaks. It’s not anything else. And I'm proud they were the ones that won it after years and years of jazz and the jazz groups being sidelined and under appreciated for their excellent music.”
- Nubya Garcia plays the Everyman as part of Guinness Cork Jazz Festival on Sunday October 26. See guinnesscorkjazz.com
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