Soul = Replenished At Source

Sometimes even the most splendid and transcendent of us end up feeling ground down, gritty and shop-soiled*, you know life and all that jazz.

So in a quest for spiritual rejuvenation I spent Monday walking in the mountains of my homeland, glorying in the sights, smells and space of it all. It was pretty grey up there but still magnificent in a stern way, life has to be good when you get to stop for lunch on top of a mountain in the remnants of an iron-age fort surrounded by stone chats with your cares blown halfway to Gehenna.

The other way I have been moisturising my soul is via Nubya Garcia’s stunning 2020 album Source, I have had it on repeat for days now.

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Nubya Garcia is a wonderful London-born tenor saxophonist of Guyanese and Trinidadian parentage.

I first stumbled across her talents via the South London jazz collective Maisha, who’s 2018 LP There Is A Place is just a stunning release. I only found out about Source a couple years after it was released via a far hipper friend and I am so glad I did. She was born in 1991; that frightens me, I suspect I own underpants older than her.

Source is intentionally reminiscent of riding easy through a vast, culturally and ethnically diverse, hustling, balmy, thriving, barmy city, just letting the sounds wash over into and through you. Garcia draws on music right across the African-diaspora, incorporating so many interesting sounds into her jazz; reggae, dubstep, soul and even touches of cumbia and calypso.

Which makes Source sound like a run across a radio dial, a series of genre exercises, it is anything but as the whole is laced together with Garcia’s soulful, soul full, love and a real gentleness, even when she’s blowing up a spiritual storm. Consider.

Opener ‘Pace’ initially comes on like Massive Attack on a jazz tip before exploding slowly into a spiritual blow down that reminds me of Sonny Rollins. I love how the band fit around Garcia, featuring Joe Armon-Jones on keys (brilliantly on this track), Sam Jones on drums and Daniel Casimir on double bass, everything feels wonderfully organic, safe even when it takes to the skies.

The message continues with, umm, ‘The Message Continues’ an up-tempo piece of late night shimmer. Then we get the reggae-adjacent title track which is just excellent, a sweet summer sounding blend of voices and sax taking us onwards and very much upwards.

My favourite tracks on Source are up next. Firstly, the intensely soulful ‘Together Is A Beautiful Place To Be’, where Garcia washes us in her gorgeous hazily lyrical playing, aided and abetted by all the band, plus trumpet player Sheila Maurice Grey. This is what togetherness should sound like. Teaming this cut up with the aching ‘Stand With Each Other’ is perfect sequencing. ‘Stand ..’ is emphatically simple, short, sweetly melancholic voices, percussion and sax adding up to far far more than the sum of its parts and a tune I play over and over.

‘Inner Game’s busy excursion into Acid Jazz territory is much less to my taste. Not to worry ‘La Cumbia Me Está Ilamando’** is next up, spreading awesomely danceable cumbia vibes with the assistance of Perla recorded in Bogota, I love the soothing vocal harmonies here. ‘Before Us: In Demerara And Causa’ which namechecks both of Garcia’s parents birthplaces, takes off into the heady realms of spiritual jazz before bringing us down with the smoky ‘Boundless Beings’ which features some great slightly off-kilter vocals from Akenya.

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There is a wonderful warmth and generosity to Source, Nubya Garcia acting as bandleader/ringmaster/creator extraordinaire using all the different textures provided by her guests and her band to great advantage, flashing across the whole spectrum of music on the LP. I am very excited about the follow-up album released later this year too.

I commend Source to you all, open your minds and just allow yourself to luxuriate in the spiritual rejuvenation and positivity of it all. It helps.

1238 Down.

*one suspects this is preferable to just being soiled?

**Cumbia is calling me.