Samara Joy: The Sound Of Joy

The last time I interviewed Samara Joy for Jazzwise – for a Taking Off profile in the August 2021 issue – she had just released her self-titled debut on Michael Janisch’s Whirlwind Recordings label. One of the year’s standout vocal jazz releases, it was immediately clear that the young singer was destined for great things. A little over three years later, with three Grammys under her belt, a nonstop touring schedule since graduating from SUNY Purchase College that same year, plus a brace of acclaimed albums on the Verve label, it would be fair to say that life has changed ever so slightly for the vocalist, songwriter, arranger and bandleader.

No sooner do we meet in the lobby of The Hoxton, Shepherd’s Bush, she’s immediately approached by a starry-eyed young couple: “We love your singing,” they chime. Midway through our conversation, the actor Ben Miller pops over to say 'hi' – she’s just appeared with him as a fellow guest on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch. Later the same day she’s doing a Q&A as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. Tomorrow, it’s BBC Radio 2 with Jamie Cullum, followed by Paris on Tuesday, then back to New York on Wednesday.

Her trajectory from placing first in the Sarah Vaughan International Vocal Jazz Competition in 2019 to being a triple Grammy winner has been nothing short of meteoric. How has such a rapid rise reshaped her artistic vision and creative journey?

“I’m grateful that it’s happened, but the purpose behind it wasn’t all of this – it was really to be a better singer, a better musician, a better collaborator, a better leader. Even though I feel like I have more creative freedom, I don’t wish to go out and try everything and do everything. I want to be in it for the long run. Any choice that I make, I want it to be one of integrity.”

Samara Joy (photo: Monika S Jakubowska)

Accompanied by her road-tested seven-piece band, Portrait, the follow-up to her Grammy-winning 2022 album Linger Awhile, reaches ever greater heights of artistic expression. The album’s title suggests an intentional moment of reflection: a deliberate pause to distil and illuminate the essence of her current artistic identity. What aspects of her musical individuality was she most keen to capture in this moment?

“I think maybe my range and creative vision. I figured a lot of time had passed between my first two albums and this most recent one, and I had a lot of time to think and experiment on what I wanted to do. Thankfully, I had the time – even amidst the craziness of the Grammys and stuff – to really explore and try to form a couple of different bands and write new lyrics to songs that I love, and listen to music that I was discovering for the first time, and absorbing that and how it affected my overall musicianship. And this album feels like the most accurate representation of who I am.”

Co-producing the album with trumpeter and bandleader Brian Lynch entailed“being a part of every piece of it,” as she puts it. From the rehearsals, to speaking with the arrangers and the band about what endings she did or didn’t like, to choosing the legendary Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

“I learned that I knew more about what I wanted than I thought. With the first two albums, I knew what I wanted to sing, I knew what felt authentic to me, but that was the extent of it,” she says. One of the key decisions was that, while she was ensconced in a vocal booth, the rest of the band had to be together in one room.

“I know that if we’re building all this chemistry on the road together, on stage, why would we go into separate booths with headphones and try to reconfigure how to play dynamically with each other. That’s how they used to do it. It sounds natural, it doesn’t sound manufactured. I wanted us to be able to express ourselves in that manner, as we had already been doing on stage together.”

The album’s splicing together of ‘Peace of Mind/Dreams Come True’, the first co-written by Joy and tenor saxist Kendric McCallister, the second a song from Sun Ra’s felicitously titled album Sound of Joy, was one of last year’s most transcendent vocal performances. With all the spotlight and attention from the Grammys and being on the road, I wonder how much of ‘Peace of Mind’ – with its impassioned opening line “Sometimes you feel like giving up, but don’t ever lose hope” – was autobiographical?

“’Peace of Mind’ came a couple months after the Grammys. I was pretty tired and pretty overwhelmed. Even looking back to it now, it just didn’t feel real. I’m still kind of grappling with all that at that time meant, and how much it meant to other people too. I was wondering, very honestly, if I wanted to continue. The song formed as a big question. How am I going to find my grounding when, as soon as I try to take a step, I’m knocked over by something else? Writing that was very therapeutic for me – it’s really my first song where I feel like I had something to say specifically about what I was going through at the time, and something that can apply to different points in my life since then.”

Another tour de force on Portrait is the Mingus tribute to Charlie Parker, ‘Reincarnation Of A Lovebird’, which features Joy’s own lyrics. She recalls listening to the Mingus piece when she was at Umbria Jazz Festival in July 2022: “It was unlike any standard song I had ever heard. It sounded so complete, even if the form was maybe irregular compared to other songs I had heard.”

Having internalised the melody and decided where she needed to switch register, she then set about writing the lyrics. McCallister, who introduced her to the song, then wrote an arrangement which featured her singing a cappella for two minutes up front.

“Challenge after challenge after challenge with this tune,” she laughs. “But I wanted to see it through – even if it didn’t work out – because the melody intrigued me.” The way in which the remarkable, free time a cappella opening section subtly transforms to mid-tempo swing is brilliantly done.

In a poignant tribute, Joy transforms her late mentor Barry Harris’ instrumental composition into a deeply personal elegy. The song ‘Now And Then (In Remembrance Of…)’ serves as an intimate musical conversation, breathing new life into a tune originally recorded on Harris’ 1975 trio album Vicissitudes. By appending her own bittersweet words to the maestro’s melody, Joy crafts a profound act of musical dialogue, paying homage to her mentor’s enduring legacy while exploring the complex emotions of loss, remembrance, and artistic inheritance.

“He’s a special individual,” she says of Harris, “not only because of his teaching style and his passion and how that passion sustained him into his nineties – he’s just a part of a different generation of musicians who were there as the music was being created. And the fact that you get to talk about meeting Charlie Parker, and teaching or working with John Coltrane and Joe Henderson. There was such a difference in the way that he played, the energy and the power – that’s the Detroit style of playing. That style and that way of playing and that way of life, I don’t think it could ever be replicated. Hopefully any inspiration that he gave to us will inspire us to push forward.”

The genesis of the album’s arrangements emerged through an organic, collaborative process on tour. When asked about how this musical journey shaped the album’s sound, Joy reflects with gratitude on the incremental development of Portrait's collective musical vision.

“I’m grateful for the way that the arrangements got the chance to develop,” she explains. “The more that we performed together, the more we realised what was possible. I don’t think this album would have happened had we not had that time. It’s the kind of musical relationship that doesn’t develop in a rehearsal or two – it really comes from playing night after night together.”

Navigating the delicate balance between jazz tradition and innovation, she traces her musical evolution from her debut to the present. “It’s a gradual process,” she notes. “For the first album all I knew was the tunes that I was learning. And so that was all I really had to express. By the time this album came along, ‘You Stepped Out of a Dream’ and ‘Day by Day’ are the only standards. They’re close to me because they’re some of the first songs I learned getting into this genre. But now I can combine it. I can not only make those songs fresh and seem like they might be mine, but also combine it with my first composition. I was writing my own lyrics to solos on my first and second albums, but writing my own composition, writing lyrics to melodically complex and intricate songs, having arrangements where I’m singing backgrounds, where I’m integrated into the song – all of these steps, I’m thinking nothing was in vain. I learned something on each album.”

Rooted in a rich musical heritage from the Bronx, Joy’s connection to music runs deep through familial bonds. Her grandparents co-founded the Philadelphia gospel group The Savettes, and her father (Antonio Charles Mclendon) is a renowned musician-vocalist in his own right. Reflecting on her earliest musical memory of music that moved her emotionally, she shares a profound insight: “I would say my family singing together. Up to a point, I thought that everybody’s family did that.” The communal musical experiences of her childhood – singing together in church every week – formed a transformative backdrop to her artistic identity. “I saw my purpose – this is what we were all created to do in this space, at least,” she recalls, capturing the essence of her musical inheritance.

Her personal playlist is an intimate tapestry woven from family recordings, gospel, and jazz inspirations. “I try to balance it, almost like if somebody’s reading multiple books at one time,” she explains. She namechecks Donny Hathaway as providing a touchstone of pure sonic pleasure, while landmark albums such as Betty Carter’s The Audience with Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln’s Straight Ahead serve as wellsprings of inspiration.

“Those two inspire me endlessly. Both of those albums were big turning points in what I felt the role of a vocalist could be in a band. And that’s what I love about being in this field, you can never really become content or stagnant or ‘I’ve made it, I’ve reached this plateau, this is the most that I can learn’. There’s always something more. And hopefully the foundational tools that you gather will help you. I may not know the exact answer to get through this challenge, but I have tools that I’ve gotten through with other challenges, and so now I have to navigate my way through this next plateau.”

Samara Joy’s Portrait is out now on Verve