Jazz vocalist Samara Joy has accomplished so much in a short amount of time. Growing up in the Bronx with a family of Gospel singers, her introduction to jazz wasn’t until the end of high school and wasn’t interested in pursing it fully until she got to college and enrolled in SUNY’s Purchase College jazz program.
“I got into the jazz program not knowing a single thing about jazz except for the song that I learned,” she said. “I’m really grateful to the professor who was the head of the conservatory at the time for giving me that opportunity, Even though I’m born and raised in New York, I hadn’t even been into a jazz club at that point and been a part of that community. I feel like going to that school, it allowed me to immerse myself completely and delve into that music every single day, day in and day out for four years, and just fall in love with it completely and understand that I feel at home with this.”
Joy continued, “I didn’t know whether I would be strictly R&B, gospel, or soul. I didn’t know what career path I was gonna go down because I just love music, I just loved to sing. When I listen to jazz truly for the first time, I felt like this genre was a place where I could challenge myself and grow. But it was also a place where I felt comfort and I felt like I could truly be myself and bring myself to it without sacrificing any other part of my identity.”
In 2019, she won the Sarah Vaughn International Jazz Vocal Competition, awarded at the TD James Moody Jazz Festival to solo vocalist who are not signed to major record labels. This gave her a boost of motivation to continue to pursue the genre. While still in college, Joy released her self-titled debut album in 2021 and the following year her breakout album Linger Awhile, taking home two Grammys for Best Jazz Vocal Album and Best New Artist for that sophomore release.
“I’m grateful that it received all of the attention and the love that it did, but I feel like a completely different vocalist than I was when I recorded those album,” she said. “Whenever I’m performing, I don’t know if I want people to get attached to one version of me and one way of singing that I recorded on the record versus the way that I do it live. So I was just like, ‘We need to do something different. We need to stir it up and keep things moving.’ Because I think once things get stagnant, it’s just no fun to listen, no fun to play, and nobody grows as a result. If I’m just doing it for the sake of the audience, because they love the album, then I’m not expanding outside of the album.”
A couple of her friends in college had their own band they created outside of the program. They dedicated time to write and hear their own arrangements, developing the muscle of writing for other people and expanding upon their own individual voices.
“I just thought it was so cool,” she said. “I was like, ‘You guys are taking the initiative and creating a class for yourself.’ [Laughs] I was consciously thinking like ‘This is how I want to break down my practice throughout the day. I want to have a 10-hour practice routine and then I wanna write for this amount of hours, and I want to work on this for this number of hours.’ I had never seen anything like that.”
After touring with a trio, Joy wanted to start a band with arrangements in the same configuration her friends created in college. She wanted different arrangers and different perspectives poured into the band. She sent everybody songs that she wanted to sing, and gave them the opportunity to arrange with no limitations or boundaries.
“In 2023, when we started playing together, versus now is a completely different band,” she said. “It would not have happened if we did not have the time to play together and to develop that chemistry on stage. I wasn’t sure whether I would record then, I just wanted something different on the road because the dates are booked. I knew that I wanted to try a different configuration. And I think I was on the tail end of promoting Linger Awhile as well. I guess the life of the record was a little longer than maybe I intended for it to be, at least in the touring period. I was just like, ‘Now it’s time for a new phase.‘”
Being on the road with her current band is what inspired her latest record Portrait. With her band, Joy will be on stage Tuesday, May 13 at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. She says with her shows it’s all about storytelling and communicating the songs that she loves and that have has resonated with her in such way that she wants to share that feeling with people.
“I think the lack of extra bells and whistles allows people to lean in even closer and even more intimately into what I have to say and I can share my heart for music,” she said. “Even though it is two hours, I feel like it flies by because the pace is energetic, and it has momentum, it has feeling. I just hope that everybody’s able to connect with all of the music, because all of it means so much to me and I hope to communicate that feeling.”
Hear the full conversation with Samara Joy talking about her musical upbringing, her introduction to jazz and her new album Portrait above the article or via the WNXP Podcast feed, wherever you listen to your podcasts.