Source We Move

After years of dance music borrowing from jazz, in the late 2010s UK jazz musicians decided to return the favor, with albums from Kamaal Williams, Moses Boyd et al. drawing from UK garage, jungle, broken beat, house, R&B, afrobeats and more in search of a new jazz swing. In this context, Source ⧺ We Move feels like a logical next step for London saxophonist Nubya Garcia after the success of her 2020 debut album Source, a modern jazz record of kaleidoscopic musical ambition. Garcia called Source “a definite ode to musical history,” with the album taking in influences from Colombian cumbia, reggae, calypso, and modern dance music to create a vision of jazz that was both historic in scope and modern in feel.

On Source ⧺ We Move, Garcia has invited musicians from the worlds of hip hop (DJ Harrison), experimental R&B (KeiyaA, Georgia Anne Muldrow), broken beat (Kaidi Tatham), house (Suricata) and South American fusion (Dengue Dengue Dengue) to remix tracks from her debut, alongside jazz musicians Nala Sinephro and Moses Boyd, with the “We Move” suffix reflecting the new album’s embrace of dance beats. And yet, on the whole, Source ⧺ We Move is less an overhaul of Garcia’s work than a spotlight on existing musical ideas. Dengue Dengue Dengue’s take on “Source,” for example, lasers in on the reggae groove that pins down the album version, while DJ Harrison teases out the hip hop cadence that underlies “The Message Continues”.