FEATURE: Spotlight: Samara Joy — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Meredith Truax

Samara Joy

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AS she won the GRAMMY…

PHOTO CREDIT: Meredith Truax

for Best New Artist on Sunday, I could not ignore the truly phenomenal and wonderful Samara Joy (Samara McLendon). I have known about her music for a while but, as I have been pretty busy, I have not got around to featuring her yet. I am glad I get to spend time with an amazing musician. The Bronx-born twenty-three-year-old Jazz artist won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition in 2019, and she was named Best New Artist by Jazz Times for 2021. Samara Joy, her debut, album came out in 2021. She followed that with last year’s Linger Awhile. Samara Joy also won the Best Jazz Vocal Album GRAMMY for Linger Awhile. It is definitely one of the most remarkable and powerful albums of last year. The incredible and soul-shaking vocals are truly unforgettable! It is a shame that, like many Jazz artists, Samara Joy’s music has only been reviewed by Jazz publications. Maybe there are one or two more mainstream publications that have reviewed it, but Linger Awhile did not get a spread of reviews from outside of the Jazz community. I will come to one of the reviews at the end, as it is clear that Samara Joy double GRAMMY win will change things! Not only will it open more eyes to her brilliant music. I hope that it will mean more people explore Jazz. As a New Artist winner at the GRAMMYs, more and more people will explore her music.

I want to bring in a few interviews with Samara Joy. Even though she has not been singing Jazz for that long, she really has established herself as one of the most important and remarkable voices in the genre. It was a real achievement winning Best New Artist at the GRAMMYs. Nominated alongside Anitta, Domi & JD Beck, Latto, Måneskin, Molly Tuttle, Muni Long, Omar Apollo, Tobe Nwigwe, and Wet Leg, the competition weas diverse and fierce! I’ll start with an interview from W Magazine from January, who wrote about Samara Joy being nominated for GRAMMYs. I love how the news was broken to her:

“When the nominations were first announced, Joy says she was on an Amtrak train returning to New York from D.C. “My family and the label team texted me around 12:30 p.m.: ‘You got nominated.’ I totally forgot,” the musician recalls with a laugh. “It’s not like I wasn’t watching it on purpose—I just wasn’t thinking about it.” Despite her nonstop touring, recording, and releasing Linger Awhile in the same year, Joy evokes a calm kind of composure, which she attributes to her close-knit family.

“Making sure that I’m always talking to [my family] keeps me grounded—FaceTiming with them all the time and keeping them in front of me. Because with everything that’s happening, it is easy to lose track of that,” she says. “The days keep going by, and my time with them—in person, at least—is lost.”

Her bond with her relatives is far more than just familial, as her lineage closely aligns with her chosen career path. Joy’s paternal grandparents, Elder Goldwire and Ruth McLendon, founded the Philadelphia gospel group The Savettes. And her father, Antonio McLendon, is a bassist and singer who toured with the late gospel singer Andraé Crouch, plus has worked with Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, and Donna Summer, among others (Joy’s last name is McLendon). She learned from her father that her grandmother started the mobile church ministry in Philadelphia. “They rented a van, and my grandparents, my dad, and his siblings would ride around, pick a corner, and just have church. My aunts and uncles would sing, and my grandmother or grandfather would preach.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Meredith Truax

Surprisingly, Joy didn’t start out singing right away. “My mom said I was very quiet when I was young—I only [ever] talked or was loud when I cried,” she recalls. Being surrounded by music, however, Joy soon realized the church, music, it was all a part of her. She decided it was time to sing, and began participating in choirs during middle school and musical theater in high school. During that time, Joy became a worship leader at her church for the next two years, which she says was crucial to her development as an artist and musician.

“All of a sudden to be put in the position of [having] to lead a song and lead a set of music—it was new to me,” she says. “People were coming up to me, like, ‘You sound good, but don’t blink when you’re up there; we can tell [that] you’re nervous.’ I was forced to get out of my comfort zone. It’s like, ‘You accepted this opportunity, and now you have to work at it. You have to develop this confidence and get away from the shyness.’”

While taking home a Grammy at the upcoming 65th ceremony would undoubtedly be a feather in her cap, for Joy, accolades are not the endgame. “This will be a long journey that, hopefully, lasts for a while,” she says. “Thinking about all this stuff now is overwhelming. I’m not going to get a big head about it because I’m aware of all the things I want to improve. And I always want to be like that. I want to celebrate the wins, but also think about what I can do to move forward, elevate, get better, learn, and just be a better artist and a better person. I’m not necessarily reaching for one mountaintop moment”.

NPR profiled the incredible Samara Joy earlier this month. An artist who, with Linger Awhile, has created one of the most soulfully beautiful and engrossing albums I have heard in years, she is primed for superstardom:

“Awards-season campaigning is more of an Oscars thing, but Joy's cheerful ubiquity, and the unforced glow of her ability, have conspired to make her perhaps the closest thing to a frontrunner in this year's best new artist race. Which is remarkable, given that Samara Joy sings jazz and songbook standards in a straight-ahead style that was last broadly popular in the 1950s and early '60s. Unlike late 20th-century platinum torchbearers Harry Connick Jr. and Diana Krall, she's finding mainstream success at a moment of extreme atomization in the music business, let alone pop culture at large. So her breakout moment comes with an inevitable burden of accountability for the art form.

"I feel it, and I understand it," Joy says about that weight on her shoulders, speaking recently from her apartment in Upper Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood. Name-checking some influences, starting with Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan, she points out that those affinities come with a natural point of departure. "I couldn't do this without that foundation that they've laid," she says. "But I am 23, and I'm singing jazz in 2023, and I come from a different background than all of those artists. So I think that carrying on the tradition is progressing as you grow, and not being in a singular box."

So it's worth restating one of the more startling talking points around Samara Joy: She's only been singing jazz for the last five years. After dipping a toe into the tradition at Fordham High School for the Arts, she received a full baptism at Purchase College, whose Jazz Studies faculty includes noted players like trumpeter Jon Faddis and drummer Kenny Washington. "Everybody was really supportive, but I still had this feeling like, 'I don't know if I belong,' " Joy now recalls. "Because I didn't have this preconceived notion of what it's supposed to sound like. But as it turns out, that allowed me to be a sponge and just soak everything in."

Her father, Antonio McLendon, is a singer and bassist who toured for years with gospel star Andraé Crouch, extending the legacy of his parents — Elder Goldwire and Ruth McLendon, who sang in the lauded Philadelphia group The Savettes. (A highlight of the Ardmore Music Hall show was a cameo by Elder Goldwire McLendon, who is 92.) While this was the tradition into which Samara was born, Antonio didn't balk at her musical pivot. "When she came into contact with jazz, she immediately developed a respect for it," he says. "I've watched her study for hours, puzzling over things: 'How does Ella Fitzgerald scat like that?' I would hear her in the middle of the night practicing horn lines, because she learned that's something Ella would do."

Considering Joy's familial foundation in gospel, soul and R&B, it's striking that her Grammy-nominated album, Linger Awhile, hews so faithfully to straight-ahead acoustic jazz. Even within those parameters, there's no cover of, say, a Lauryn Hill or Stevie Wonder song. This speaks to Joy's relationship with the jazz canon, which is still in the act of formation. But it also capitalizes on what you might call a market opportunity. Jazz hasn't been hurting for exceptional vocal talent lately, but all of the artists who broke through to a mainstream audience within the last dozen years — Gregory Porter, esperanza spalding, Cécile McLorin Salvant, José James, Jazzmeia Horn — have moved on from a traditional mode, delving into other forms and approaches. Joy has stepped all the way in to fill the void.

Joy could go that route if she so chooses, just as she's begun to alter the public dimensions of her style. This week, as part of a best new artist tie-in with Spotify, she released a luxuriously intimate cover of Adele's blockbuster ballad "Someone Like You" — backed only by Shedrick Mitchell on organ, just as she'd been at the outset of "O Holy Night" in Ardmore. Joy's performance on the track is a study in gradual build and unguarded emotional connection, and it's a testament to her supreme self-confidence that she had the nerve to tackle the song.

She's scheduled to perform at the Grammy Premiere Ceremony on Sunday, and what happens beyond that is a matter of conjecture. For the whole spectrum of her fan base, which is probably about to get bigger and broader, this feels like a pivotal moment. Joy sees it, purely and simply, as a blessing. "The goal is to be as true to myself as I can be," she says, "while continuing to grow and stretch the boundaries of what I think I can do”.

Before getting to a review for Linger Awhile, I want to finish with an interview from Forbes. It is a fascinating and deep read. Here, Sage Bava (she is a nomadic artist with unique music that falls into the R&B and dark Folk categories) – talks with Samara Joy about her start and songs that influenced her:

“Sage Bava: I can't believe that you said you only started singing jazz when you were 18. I saw that in an NPR interview. And I know that you were probably singing since you were born with all of these different genres. What was that like to find jazz at 18?

Joy: Towards the end of high school, I was a part of a jazz band. It was an elective more than it was a part of the curriculum and everything. The teacher over the band program asked me if I wanted to sing a couple of songs for the jazz band. So I agreed. I was like, "I don't really know anything about this, but I love to sing." Like you said, I've been surrounded by singers and musicians all my life through my family and through their influences. But it was time to go to college, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I wasn't sure if music would have been a stable choice for me to pursue. And I love gospel, I love R&B, I love soul, maybe I could see myself in those genres. But still I hadn't found something that I felt like I could do, where I could tell my story in a unique way. We all have our own voices, and so I can't copy anybody or imitate anybody as much as I would like. So I auditioned. I was in this program, and we were required to apply at the end of our high school career for six state schools. SUNY Purchase was one of the schools that I chose, and I auditioned, I saw they had a wonderful jazz voice program, I knew two jazz songs and I used that one to audition and get in. And the head of the Conservatory at the time, his name is Pete Malinverni, he was really kind to me during the audition and the whole process. He emailed me later on saying, "Thank you so much for your audition, we would love for you to be a part of this program." And I was like, "I don't know. The next four years determine the rest of my life, and I have to make the right choice, or else everything's doomed from here." At least that's the way that it felt. It turned out to be the best decision for me. So that's how it happened.

Baltin: Was there that one song early on for you where you realized that it had relevance and that you could make it speak to you in 2021, 2020?

Joy: That's a good question. One of the songs from that assignment that we ended up choosing was Nancy Wilson, singing "Save Your Love For Me," with Cannonball Adderley. And I remember listening to her and of course it's a beautiful song on its own. But when you hear the original recording versus hers, which are years apart, you're like, "Yeah, it really depends on who the interpreter is. It brings the song off paper and brings it to life." And so that's why it's fun with jazz. Of course we sing the melody, but then the second or third chorus of us singing it, we experiment with it and we add changes or we change the phrasing up. So it's not exactly as written. Because if we sing it exactly as written, there's nothing more being done about it to make it contemporary at all. So you take the good foundation of a song, but then you put it in the hands of a Nancy Wilson or Sarah Vaughan and it comes to life. It's the same song, but they bring it to life in different ways and add their own emotional fuel to connect with the audience and make it real.

Bava: I'd love to know what artists right now, in the contemporary space, that you love, whether they be singer/songwriters or in jazz.

Joy: Well, I definitely have a lot of love for Cécile McLorin Salvant and Jazzmeia Horn, who I both have the pleasure of knowing personally or at least getting to know personally. But I admire both of their approaches to jazz and approaches to expressing themselves through their own music, through standards, but also through their original compositions and their arrangements. They're the whole package as far as artists go. I admire their artistry, their musicianship, their performance style, the way that they are, the way that they present themselves, everything”.

I will end with a review for the stunning Linger Awhile. I think that it is one of the best albums from last year. It is clear that, after a double GRAMMY win, Samara Joy is going to be a major festival name. Her music will be picked up by people who may not have heard it until now. Jazz Wise were full of praise for Samara Joy’s spectacular second studio album:

“Released last year on Whirlwind, Samara Joy McLendon's debut album announced the arrival of a remarkable new talent, a vocalist who possessed timing, timbral richness and emotional power in abundance.

On this follow-up album, released on the iconic Verve label, the winner of the 2019 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition pays homage to one of her most important touchstones on opener ‘Can’t Get Out Of This Mood’, which Vaughan recorded in 1950 with George Treadwell and his All Stars. Containing echoes of the version recorded by the great Carmen McRae on her 1957 album After Glow, ‘Guess Who I Saw Today’ is a standout. In addition to dusting down ‘Social Call’, written by Gigi Gryce with lyrics by vocalese legend Jon Hendricks, the singer presents two stunning additions to the genre in the shape of Fats Navarro's ‘Nostalgia (The Day I Knew)’ plus ‘I'm Confessin’ (That I Love You)’, the latter based on Lester Young's solo from the album Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio recorded in NYC exactly 70 years earlier in 1952. With outstanding support from guitarist Pasquale Grasso, pianist Ben Paterson, bassist David Wong and drummer Kenny Washington, the title track – first recorded almost 100 years ago in 1923 by Bailey's Lucky Seven – blazes like an exploding star. Augmented by horns (trumpeter Terell Stafford, trombonist Donavan Austin, tenorist Kendrick McCallister), there's a wondrous take on Monk's ‘Round Midnight’ (in the version with lyrics by Hendricks) while, accompanied solely by Grasso, the singer's incredibly beautiful timbre is heard to best effect in the Gershwins’ ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’, which brings this staggeringly fine album to a close”.

With one of the most unforgettable voices in music, everyone needs to hear and experience the music of Samara Joy! It is going to be exciting seeing where she goes next and how she follows Linger Awhile. Although her style is rooted in Jazz of the 1950s and before, there is this contemporary edge and diversity that will appeal to a wide audience. This wonderful musician will have such…