Nubya Garcia and Somi
The Symphony Center is a place where tradition sits up straight. But for one night, tradition might slip off its sensible heels and try something a little more fluid. On March 13, Nubya Garcia and Somi take center stage to rearrange the room’s expectations with a single shared premise: tradition is a starting point, not a fence.
Garcia arrives as a defining voice of London’s future-facing jazz movement. She’s a tenor saxophonist turned worldbuilder whose sound feels both rooted and restless. Her compositions often carry the weight of dub, the rhythm of Afro-Caribbean pulse and the propulsion of West London broken beat after dark, to name just a few. Live, that architecture tends to flex. Themes and new genres come along unhurried, drums push and pull like a late-night bus ride through each and ideas come together in unexpected ways. In Garcia’s hands, this kind of fusion is a tool for creating ecosystems. Every element feeds the next, until the music feels inhabited and the audience forgets the room around them.
Somi operates with a different kind of gravity. Born in Illinois to Rwandan and Ugandan parents, the Grammy-nominated vocalist and composer has built her career bridging continents and customs. Her voice moves through jazz phrasing into diasporic pop without ever signaling a border crossing. Even when her arrangements are their most lavish, there’s always a narrative core: songs that trace love, migration and memory. Whether channeling the spirit of Miriam Makeba or enticing audiences with modern-day love stories between Harlem and Kigali, Somi’s stage is her own personal storytelling circle.
Together, they’ll flip the script on what a show beneath the Symphony Center’s grand arches can be. This is a room most often associated with the legacy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Think precision, convention and the towering European canon. Yet Chicago has always been more musically unruly than its marble façade might suggest. This is the city of South Side house music, of the AACM, of boundary-pushing jazz that refused to sit quietly. In that context, Garcia and Somi’s appearance feels like a homecoming. One where jazz is a language elastic enough to hold East African melodic turns, R&B atmospherics and more all at once.
What’s more, March is Women’s History Month. It’s fitting timing, as both have carved out space in scenes where innovation is often framed as male by default. Garcia and Somi may stand in these lineages, but they are unmistakably and unapologetically self-defined. They’re also much more than a celebratory or commemorative gesture. They represent women not as a symbol of inclusion or an exception in jazz, but as architects of the sound, leaders of its evolution.
On March 13, Symphony Center will make space for a future where women like Nubya Garcia and Somi don’t just visit the canon, they reshape it.
Nubya Garcia and Somi perform at the Symphony Center, 220 South Michigan, on Friday, March 13. Tickets start at $39, available at cso.org.
