Nubya Garcia 5 stars
Barbican London

Nubya Garcia’s debut EP, Nubya’s 5ive, released in 2017, combined the tough breakbeats of London’s urban music scene with the dynamic sensibility of her jazz forebears, and established her place as one of her generation’s leading jazz musicians.

Three years on, and her much-anticipated debut album pushes this same combination into yet more accomplished and innovative territory. It is an album, she told the New York Times recently, focused on the themes of “personal power, collective power, collectivism,” and this is her first concert since its release.

Opening track Stand With Each Other is a duet between Nubya and drummer Sam Jones. A sparse and searching piece, its haunting four-note motif sets the tone for the evening by managing to be simultaneously melancholic and uplifting.

They are then joined by double bass (Daniel Casimir) and keyboards (Joe Armon-Jones) for the album’s title track Source, based around a bass heavy dub groove rooted firmly in the King Tubby/ Studio One tradition.

It is the perfect backdrop for Nubya’s soulful explorations, so much so that it makes you wonder why this combination of dub reggae and spiritual jazz has been so seemingly underexplored. The track also features some outstanding keyboard virtuosity from Armon-Jones, evoking such Jamaican jazz greats as Monty Alexander.

In the Message Continues, the combination of funky breakbeat and luscious rhodes keys recalls the acid jazz phenomenon of the ’90s, when pop and jazz overcame their mutual suspicions and embraced in a blissful union that was so much more than the sum of its parts. Like that scene, the current explosion of British jazz really is a movement, a genuinely collaborative and intensely creative cross-fertilisation of talent.

Each of the musicians here, including Nubya herself, are part of several other projects, bringing the techniques and influences they have imbibed to bear on a highly diverse and sophisticated emerging canon.

The real stand-out track for me is Pace. It opens with an extended bass solo in which Casimir seems at times to be channelling not only Mingus but even Monk, before breaking into a deeply soulful and expansive piece, all brass harmonies (courtesy of Sheila Maurice-Grey on trumpet), shimmering piano and thundering drums.

This is the pinnacle of Nubya’s fusion of the urgent freneticism of urban club music and the ecstatic reaching for transcendence of Pharoah Sanders and the Coltranes (John and Alive both).

An inspired musician and composer whose forward thinking and innovative creativity are rooted in a deep respect for the giants on whose shoulders she stands.

Exactly how music should be.