Nubya Garcia

Along with fellow reedist Shabaka Hutchings, saxophonist Nubya Garcia has emerged as a leading light of 21st-century British jazz, blurring the lines between post-bop, Jamaican grooves, and club culture. Born in London in 1991 to a Guyanese mother and Trinidadian-British father, she began playing violin aged five and picked up the saxophone five years later, going on to play in workshops led by double bassist Gary Crosby of the Tomorrow’s Warriors organization. By the time she graduated from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in 2016 she’d become a presence on the scene, releasing her first EP as a leader, Nubya’s 5ive, in 2017, and co-founding the septet Nérija, which dropped its debut recording on Domino in 2019. (She’s also a member of the collective Maisha.) In 2020 she released her debut full-length, Source, on Concord Jazz, a forceful album of original material connecting her ardor for post-bop with the heavy Caribbean influences she grew up with.