“It was terrible! The nerves! I was so nervous! So, so nervous!” exclaims New York singer Samara Joy of her first visit to the Grammys in 2023, when she won Best Jazz Vocal Album for her second album Linger Awhile and Best New Artist. “It was really overwhelming because I’m not part of that Hollywood world and it was my first time seeing all those celebrities up close and personal.”
Joy might be beginning to feel more at home in that sphere. This year she won another Grammy, for Best Jazz Performance for her version of Betty Carter’s Tight. But she’s doubtful that fame might change her. She admits the possibility but knows why she began singing: “It wasn’t to be a jazz superstar, it was because I enjoyed it and because it allows me to be vulnerable, it allows me to do what I love but also to be challenged, to grow.”
From the beginning of her career – she released her self-titled debut album in 2021, when she was still a student – Joy, now 24, has been compared to the likes of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and critics and listeners have been captivated by her emotional power, her rich, warm tone, her subtle phrasing and the flexibility of her voice. Christian McBride, no less, has observed that she “sounds and tells stories like an elder”.
Her new album Portrait will surely increase her standing still further. “What satisfies me most about the album is the sound – which is attributed to recording in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio.” She refers to the studio once owned by one of jazz’s most revered recording engineers. “And all the musicians were in the same room, not separated by booths, so the record has an organic feel. It’s authentic.”
All the songs on the album had been played live by Joy and her band before the sessions. “The advantage of spending more time with the music was that we built a relationship, not only with the music but with each other, and developed different ways to play and approach the songs.”
Joy explains how she works with her band on an album. “It’s democratic. I choose the songs and give them to the arrangers, the musicians, and I let their minds run free. They’re very musical and I know their first priority is supporting me: writing for me, not writing for what they think a standard vocal song arrangement should sound like.”
‘On the first two albums I wasn’t confident enough to listen back to my own takes and choose my favourite’
Joy believes her approach in the studio has developed. “What’s consistent over all three albums is choosing all the songs because I enjoy surfing and digging for repertoire. But on the first two albums I wasn’t confident enough to listen back to my own takes and choose my favourite. I didn’t feel like I was singing the songs the way I wanted to in my head so I didn’t want to listen back. But now I can listen back honestly and understand that this is just a snapshot of where I am at this moment in time. It doesn’t have to be perfect. So I’m more mature in that way, I think.”
There is no song entitled Portrait on the album so Joy explains why she chose that as the title of the album. “I wanted to show people, ‘Hey, just like the more you look at a piece of art the more you notice different details, so with this album.’ I’ve learned and grown [since] Linger Awhile and I wanted people to understand that there are so many different colours and textures and layers that I’m accessing on this album. So hopefully people’s definition of me is expanded.”
The album includes Charles Mingus’s Reincarnation Of A Lovebird, with new lyrics by Joy. “I was drawn to the composition because of the melody,” she says. “It was unlike any melody I’d ever heard, way different from any standard melodic or harmonic form, but I felt like I could do it. And so I spent a year, a couple of months at a time, just learning the melody and internalising it, and then adding lyrics – sometimes only a few words would come but eventually it got there.”
Joy also adds lyrics to Now And Then, which was composed by bebop pianist and educator Barry Harris, whom she regards as a mentor. “Seeing Barry Harris in his 80s and 90s and the passion still in the way he practised and created let me know that we as artists never stop learning. This life of an artist is literally forever.”
The album includes standards like You Stepped Out Of A Dream and Day By Day. “The messages are so simple and straight to the point,” she says of the appeal of such songs. “And hopefully the way that I perform them adds a fresh take on them.”
‘I never learned Tea For Two. I didn’t connect with those lyrics. There are some songs that are outmoded, like Wives And Lovers’
Joy concedes however, that some songs from the Great American Songbook are impossible for her to relate to. “I never learned Tea For Two for example. I didn’t connect with those lyrics. There are some songs that are outmoded, like Wives And Lovers, which expresses a woman’s role as a wife, but a vocalist like Cécile McLorin Salvant can interpret that like, ‘This song is a reflection of where we were as a society. It’s part of our history.’ [That] can be enlightening. But I prefer to sing what I really believe in.”
She doesn’t believe, however, that she needs to have experienced the same emotions as are described in songs to sing them persuasively. “I like imagining! I used to watch a lot of romantic movies, I enjoy storytelling, so in songs I enjoy imagining myself in those kinds of situations, like the movies.”
Peace Of Mind is the only song on the album for which Joy wrote both words and music. “With that song I was just at the piano and I started writing the melody and realised it was an idea that I wanted to pursue. Then I started writing lyrics about dealing with all the attention over the past couple of years and how overwhelming it’s been becoming an adult in the process.”
Joy now regularly plays large concert halls and in fact is due to make her Carnegie Hall debut in 2025. Might the nature of such venues constrain her musical adventurousness? “People are not paying for me to sing everything the same way or play it safe or do something manicured and perfect,” she argues. “The beauty is in the improvisation and the spontaneity. For a year or two my daily work was in jazz clubs and I’m glad that I was able to practise how to sing freely and execute whatever it is that’s on my mind in that very moment in jazz clubs. Now in concert halls I feel the difference in the room but I have the same approach.”