Nubya Garcia at Roadrunner 3/18

To see Nubya Garcia, you enter through the front door. There’s four sets of them in Allston-Brighton, and at 7 pm on a March Friday, they open up to Roadrunner. Is it the Roadrunner or Roadrunner? It’s the new venue in Boston, shoehorned below the New Balance Global Flagship Boston Landing. Not that you would know, it’s big inside. And pretty nice too; that’s what everyones talking about. How nice it is, how it’s the best venue in Boston now. Someone responds: “no that’s the House of Blues, maybe.” But they change their tense, and the excitement about the new – and actually purpose-built venue – builds. Roadrunner opened three days ago on March 15th. It’s the 18th now, and it’s the second night of Nubya Garcia opening for Khruangbin.

I’m here for Nubya Garcia. They play jazz, maybe. I say maybe because it feels rare that any artist wants to categorize their music. So: they play music. People call the music they play Spiritual Jazz, or Afro-Jazz, or Jazz Fusion, or Post-Bop. I don’t know enough to say otherwise, but I like how it sounds. It doesn’t sound like anything yet, because everyone’s waiting around for the time being. There’s that usual pre-opener air where people talk a lot and look around. There’s a lot of talking, especially because the cell service isn’t great. That’s probably because of the whole New Balance Global Flagship Boston Landing thing that’s above Roadrunner, but again, you can’t tell. People comment on the lack of columns and estimate how many people can fit into the building. Numbers range from 300 to 10,000. Someone says 4,427 as if that were the precise occupancy limit. Since the service isn’t great I look it up later on the bus ride home and the real number is 3,500. Does that include the performers? If a choir played at Roadrunner, the floor area would stay the same, but the number of people would increase. What do you do with that? There seems to be a lot of calculations and ambiguities in the world of music. What’s a genre? Is a performer an occupant? And then, the next question: How many people are Nubya Garcia?

The answer you give to that is either going to be one or four. One, since the saxophonist is named Nubya Garcia. Four, since there are four musicians who will come on stage billed under the name Nubya Garcia. You might also say five, or three, or two, or six, but all of those would be wrong here. There’s a whole bunch of instruments set up on stage, so it could be that there’s only two musicians who jump between them, or maybe there’ll be a whole bunch more instruments brought out when they enter. That’s not going to happen though. There’ll be four of them. One, on the left, cornered between two keyboards. Then, to the right a little more, a stand up bassist. Then Nubya Garcia herself on the tenor saxophone. Then the drummer to the right of her. Behind them, there is a gray curtain. You would call it a black curtain, but the way the ambient Roadrunner light falls on it, it looks gray and kind of matte. Maybe charcoal is the word. Its got lumps like charcoal, two of them, massive and symmetrical and round, some kind of platform for the headliner. 

People talk about the lumps, talk about that headliner; Khruangbin. It’s that weird world of being the opener. Look, sometimes you have to wonder what the role of the opener is. Is it like the trailers they show before movies? Apparently we need things to build up our excitement. But where does that leave the thing that was there to build up the excitement in the first place? It feels like a weird limbo for the opener, where you get to play in front of an audience bigger than you might otherwise, but the people there aren’t going to be there for you specifically. I don’t get it, and later on that bus ride home I look up Why Do Concerts Have Opening Acts, but I don’t find a satisfying answer. Maybe that’s because I used DuckDuckGo, but maybe openers are just like Bandcamp Fridays: artifacts that don’t make sense from the outside, but leave everyone pretty satisfied. I get to see Nubya Garcia, so I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m excited.

They come out; Nubya Garcia the saxophonist and Nubya Garcia the collection of musicians, and they start to play. I like the way it sounds. I like jazz as a formless, propulsive entity. I like my ignorance of the genre and the instruments. I don’t want to know the name of the notes or how a saxophone works or what technique is being used to play. I like to stand there and listen. I like to bounce and bob. The crowd does too. The crowd is remarkably attentive for an opener. You could set up a game of Opener Or Headliner where you ask people on the street whether this crowd was for the opener or headliner and people would say opener. That’s spectacular. I do still later look up Why Do Concerts Have Opening Acts, but here it makes total sense. The crowd loves a good opener, because everyone likes great music. Nubya Garcia is great music. The crowd loves Nubya Garcia. I stand and my head moves., My knees bounce too. I listen to the notes that I am unable to describe. Wow, I like those notes together. A part of me is tempted to search Why Do We Like Jazz So Much on my bus ride later, but I don’t. I just listen to each performer play their sounds. They ripple and fade above each other like voices. I hear them talking back and forth, and I bob along. It’s very conversational, even if it takes 15 minutes for anyone on stage to say any words. Nubya Garcia, the saxophonist, comments on the night. There’s the platitudes of the performer: the welcome to the night, the how are you doing, the name of the songs. Then back to the music. Nubya plays a hollowish sound, it goes on for a minute starting and stopping back again. It’s really great, I feel like I really hear it. I nod along and then the keys come in, or maybe the drums. They swell and sweep and soar. People are dancing in the penned-in kind of way, the kind where you can only really move your head. But people’s heads are moving, and people move up closer. The instruments keep talking, and people keep nodding. There’s a rhythm, the expectation of the next note. And then there’s the flourishes, the things you don’t expect, the things that make your head move from side to side added on to the nodding that was there before. It reminds me of how you can add waves of different periods and amplitudes to get much more complex waveforms. Later, I look up Adding Waveforms And Phases on my bus ride home because I like the way those waveform diagrams look. I nod along in the meanwhile though. The sounds pass between me without much thought. I like it that way. It’s very temporal, very time based, but also not temporal at all – it’s much more spiritual than earthly. I lose myself listening, at least a little bit. And the songs play until they don’t, and the smile I’ve had the entire time persists. 

Khruangbin plays; they’re great too. My smile keeps as well. I get on the bus home and I look up all those things: Is It The Roadrunner Or Roadrunner and What Genre Is Nubya Garcia Really and Are Performers Included In An Occupancy Limit and Why Do Concerts Have Opening Acts and Adding Waveforms And Phases. But my phone is low, so I turn it off and I look through the photos I took, the photos where I had to keep myself from bobbing as I took them. I look and see what I saw as I heard the music, and I smile some more.