A year and a half after Nubya Garcia’s debut album SOURCE established her as the brightest saxophonist in the London jazz revival, the remix project finally begins — and it kicks off not with a polite rework, but with a full-blooded soundsystem reinvention. Pace (Moses Boyd Remix) is the first taster of the SOURCE remix series, released on Concord Jazz this week, and it carries considerable weight with it: the original Pace was a high-water mark of that record, its meditative sax theme gradually unspooling over nine patient minutes.
That Garcia has handed the track to Boyd is casting so obvious it feels inevitable. Both are products of the same south-London pipeline — Tomorrow’s Warriors, the jazz houses of Dalston and Deptford — and both have spent the last few years proving that jazz and the soundsystem are not opposing forces but two dialects of the same language. Boyd, as ever, handles the translation brilliantly, taking the sax-led narrative of the original and feeding it through a drum & bass filter.
Pace was the first taster of Nubya Garcia's SOURCE remix project.
From the opening bars the remix makes its intentions clear: rolling breakbeats, a sub-heavy bassline and chords so wide they feel oceanic. Garcia’s saxophone is the fixed point around which everything orbits, but Boyd treats it with a producer’s respect rather than reverence — chopping, echoing and re-pitching phrases so the horn functions as both soloist and texture. The midpoint switch, where the drums fall away and the chords open up into something approaching rapture, is the moment the record truly lands — a reminder that this is a drummer’s remix through and through, every fill and ghost note placed with intent.
A five-minute remix is a small canvas, but Pace (Moses Boyd Remix) makes it feel vast. Bandcamp Daily called it “frankly, majestic”, and it’s hard to argue — this is the rare remix that deepens the original rather than simply reframing it, Boyd’s breakbeat architecture giving Garcia’s horn new places to breathe. If this is the standard to which the rest of the SOURCE remix project is held, the full record will be unmissable.
