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.”
