Judging by the clubby, standup venues that she sells out and the youngish crowds she attracts, you could be forgiven for assuming that Londoner Nubya Garcia is some pop-friendly, jazz-dance crossover artist. But this is a serious, uncompromising tenor saxophonist who plays challenging and intense music; a soloist who seems incapable of playing anything lightweight or flippant. There is no aimless riffing over funk beats: her solos are slowly mutating tone poems, often made up of simple, repeated phrases that slowly build to a climax, always taking the crowd with her.
What’s even more interesting is the pan-global, rhythmic babel that her band have built. Most of them studied on the jazz course at Trinity Laban College in south-east London and clearly know their African-American jazz history, but this seems to be the first generation of British musicians making jazz that is distinctly, defiantly, gleefully post-American. There is barely a vestige of a swing rhythm throughout; instead, the two drummers, Sam Jones and special guest Moses Boyd, superimpose calypso rhythms on drum’n’bass patterns, move from bubbly dub reggae into 2-step, from Latin funk to Afrobeat. Even when Theon Cross guests on tuba, his percussive low-end blasts don’t recall a New Orleans marching band, but the trouser-flapping sub-bass sound on a grime track.
There are a few issues: Joe Armon-Jones’s virtuosic solos are marred by tinny amplification that makes his keyboard sound like a toy piano. And one longs to see Garcia in a venue where the full intensity of her performance carries out from beyond the moshpit to the back of the hall. Still, this seems like the apotheosis of a scene that is making history, reinventing jazz in a London accent.
• At the Komedia, Brighton, on 5 March. Then touring.
