The Promise and the Blur: Nubya Garcia’s Festival Closing Set

When

23 November 2025

Where

HERE at Outernet, London

Who

Nubya Garcia

Max Luthert

Sam Jones

Lyle Barton

Jamz Supernova

What

The finale of EFG London Jazz Festival 2025 featuring Nubya Garcia and her band, opened by Jamz Supernova.

Why

After hearing SHABAKA and Hiromi’s Sonicwonder earlier in the festival, I was curious to see what it would mean for Nubya Garcia to close the London Jazz Festival in a very different space, with a very different promise: a late-night, standing-room show in HERE at Outernet, complete with bespoke visuals projected onto the venue’s giant LED screen.

Nubya Garcia Band © Tatiana Gorilovsky

Live Notes

The change of room already reframed expectations. The Barbican, where SHABAKA and Hiromi had played, is an archetypal concert hall: fixed seating, frontal acoustics, everything oriented toward listening. HERE at Outernet is almost the opposite – a subterranean, club-like box four floors below Tottenham Court Road, designed for 1,500 standing bodies, with light and screen doing as much work as sound. The evening began with Jamz Supernova’s DJ set, which kept the atmosphere closer to a club warm-up than a typical festival support act, and the main set started noticeably later than billed – a delay that might not matter in a purely dance context, but which here reinforced the sense that visual and atmospheric build-up were being weighted as heavily as the music itself.

On paper, the band could hardly be stronger. Garcia arrived off the back of Odyssey, the 2024 album that extends her blend of spiritual jazz, dub and orchestral colour, and she brought with her the now-established touring rhythm section: Max Luthert on bass, Sam Jones on drums, with Lyle Barton on keyboards and electronics fleshing out the harmony. This is a group that has already been tested in festival conditions and in more traditional concert settings. And in the opening stretches of the set – built around material from Source and Odyssey, including a version of “The Message Continues” – you could sense why they have become central figures in the London scene: the bass lines heavy but mobile, the drums carving broken-beat patterns that lean as much toward contemporary beat culture as toward hard bop, the saxophone riding on top with a broad, vocal tone.

Yet what unfolded over the next ninety minutes never quite matched the promise of that line-up. Compared with Sonicwonder at the Barbican – a band that appeared entirely without attitude, simply took their places and played at a frighteningly high level, leaving everything else to the music – Garcia’s show leaned heavily into presentation. The musicians were sharply styled, framed by a constant stream of cosmic imagery: nebulae, starfields, abstract planetary forms drifting slowly across the immense screen. In principle this interstellar staging could have articulated something essential in her recent work, which often reaches for a sense of journey and cosmology. In practice, it sometimes felt as though the visual dramaturgy was doing work that the sound could not consistently sustain.

The problem was not concept but execution. Sam Jones’ drumming drew on the now widely circulated language of hyperactive, almost JD-Beck-like continuous chops: hi-hat runs and snare flurries that turn the backbeat into a dense, flickering texture. At its best this gave the music a nervous propulsion; at its worst it slid into a kind of gestural blur. Several times, fills that looked dazzling from the balcony – sticks flying, arms carving big arcs through the light – landed slightly behind or ahead of the beat, or smeared accents that the rest of the band seemed to be aiming for. The result was a rhythmic surface that promised more than it delivered: visually spectacular, musically a little sloppy.

Nubya Garcia © Tatiana Gorilovsky

A parallel issue emerged in the saxophone sound. Garcia’s basic tone remains compelling: warm, rounded, with the grain of the instrument always audible even when pushed hard. But the decision to bathe the horn in heavy reverb and delay – presumably to fill the large room and match the “cosmic” aesthetic – had a severe cost. Anything faster than an eighth-note line quickly dissolved into mush; runs that acoustically were almost certainly articulated with clarity became indistinct clouds of notes, their inner rhythm buried under the tail of the previous phrase. On medium and up-tempo tunes, the ear no longer followed the contour of a line but only its general energy. The effect was to flatten the difference between a carefully built solo and a more routine passage: both arrived at the listener as washes of saxophone colour hovering over the beat.

This is not to say that the evening lacked strong moments. When the tempo dropped and the band opened the texture, the same reverb that had previously obscured detail suddenly made sense. Sustained notes bloomed into the room; the interplay between bass and drums became legible; motifs from Odyssey gained a certain widescreen aesthetic, at times reminiscent of the legendary Cowboy Bebop soundtrack or even Ornette Coleman’s Virgin Beauty. There were stretches where Garcia’s phrasing, given more harmonic and temporal space, reconnected with the spiritual-jazz lineage that first brought her to prominence. But these moments alternated with passages where the sheer ambition – drums, synths, processed saxophone, screen imagery – produced less an image of mastery than of poorly executed pretension.

The contrast with SHABAKA’s festival appearance earlier in the week is instructive. SHABAKA has recently moved away from the overtly maximalist language of his work with Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming toward a more stripped-back, meditative register; live, this registered as a refusal of spectacle in favour of concentrated sound. Hiromi’s Sonicwonder, for their part, achieved something opposite but equally focused: a virtuosic, almost prog-jazz excess whose internal precision kept every detail audible.

Garcia’s Outernet show seemed to sit uneasily between these poles: committed to the idea of a fully immersive, audio-visual “journey”, but without the rhythmic tightness or sonic clarity needed to make that immersion musically compelling from start to finish. One could say, more generally, that the evening dramatised a tension running through much of the contemporary London scene: between the desire to treat jazz as dance music again – to draw on club culture, sound-system aesthetics, the visual vocabulary of electronic festivals – and the still unresolved question of how jazz functions in such environments. When the room, the lights and the projections demand constant escalation, solos risk becoming pure display, spectacle for its own sake. In the end it was precisely the interstellar metaphor – weightlessness, the sense of being carried far away – that was least convincingly delivered.