Good music in the wrong place
This is fucking London. Tank tops, bucket hats, sunglasses, rough sound. Nubya Garcia is there and overwhelms opera and sound engineering.
With Garcia, an institution of the young London jazz scene plays at the 46th Leipziger Jazztage. On the opening night, she takes the stage at the Leipzig Opera House after Abdullah Ibrahim and provides a musical counterprogram.
Where before there was a lot of silence and reflection with Ibrahim, now there is pure energy. The drummer kicks off the concert with a tight groove, joined by reggae-like keys and double bass. Then the eponymous artist dances in front of the audience with saxophone in hand and the stage drips with coolness. She accompanies the melody lines with hip movements, the beat she kicks into the floor.
In the background: lively communication between the drummer and keyboardist and the mixing console. By means of hand signals, they try to readjust the sound while playing. A possible explanation: after travel complications, both musicians landed in Dresden instead of Leipzig and arrived at the opera correspondingly late.
The musicians have less control over the sound outside. The space of the opera, which is not designed for electronically amplified music, makes a clear sound difficult. What comes out of the loudspeaker towers left and right of the stage at the beginning can be benevolently described as a musical mishmash from the fourth row. Garcia's saxophone in the first piece "Source" is almost completely lost in the mix and so the sound improves only to a limited extent over the course of the concert. Too bad about the piano solos, because the award-winning pianist Deschanel Gordon is certainly good. Always clear, however, are the drums: On them, Sam Jones provides the rhythmic, never-stopping underpinnings to Garcia's music, playfully changing the groove and driving forward.
Even the location, the Leipzig Opera House, and parts of its audience don't quite seem to fit Garcia's sound. The juxtaposition of the concerts that evening captures well the spirit of the festival, showing how different generations interpret jazz differently. At the same time, here lies the conflict: for Abdullah Ibrahim, opera is the appropriate place to listen devoutly and nod one's head in understanding. For the music of Nubya Garcia, to which the head and especially the body want to move faster, the seats and rows become an obstacle. The artist is also confronted with this situation: she asks the audience to feel free to get up and dance if they want to. The appeal succeeds only to a limited extent. A few dance, others leave. The artist also seeks exchange between songs: several times she asks the audience, some of whom have fallen silent during the general break, whether they are still there. She asks about the mood, she asks about title ideas for unreleased songs, she asks whether people know London. The answers remain restrained until the end. The atmosphere of the opera and parts, especially unfortunately the older part, of the audience are to blame here as well.
The sound is cool, and so is the band. The body wants to move and you want to shout out the answers. But not at the opera. Therefore the appeal: Dear Nubya, please come again. There are other stages in Leipzig.