Adama Jalloh

Nubya Garcia

Just five years since her recording debut with the mini-album Nubya's 5ive – selling out the entire vinyl edition in a day – saxophonist Nubya Garcia (London, 1991) is already a shining star on the British and world jazz scene.

Garcia has been playing music since five, playing the saxophone since ten, and graduated in jazz performance from the Trinity Laban Conservatory in London. Her musical upbringing is marked by work with Gary Crosby's Tomorrow's Warriors collective – the greatest source of contemporary British jazz talent. She cites Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane as her main influences among saxophonists, although she doesn't shy away from mixing jazz with various genres of popular music in her expression.

In 2018, she released the single When We Are, experimenting with jazz and electronica mix. The same year, she played on five (out of nine) tracks on the Brownswood compilation of the new London jazz heroes (Shabaka Hutchings, Joe Armon-Jones, Theon Cross, Maisha, Kokoroko...) We Out Here, and won the UK Breakthrough Act award by the Jazz FM radio station – a year later, that station awarded her the UK Jazz Act of the Year. In 2020, her debut album Source was released for the famous Concord Jazz label, introducing her to jazz lovers on the other side of the Atlantic. The following year, Garcia was the greatest talent among tenor saxophonists on the DownBeat magazine list, Jazz Instrumentalist of the Year in the Parliamentary Jazz Awards, among the nominees for the greatest talent of the Jazz Journalists Association (absolute category), as well as for the Mercury Prize (for the Album of the Year in Britain).

https://www.nubyagarcia.com/