THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “I’m still speechless,” says Samara Joy, reflecting on her 2023 Grammy win for Best New Artist. When the Bronx jazz vocalist, 24, tries to place herself back in that historic moment today, she feels nothing but gratitude.
At the same time, Joy understood then that she couldn’t let the award define her. She still had a lifetime of music to explore, a tight-knit crew of extraordinary collaborators to guide, and a passion for songwriting to nurture. So Joy did what any committed, curious jazz musician would do: She hit the road. For her and her band, a seemingly endless run of sold-out dates became a nightly opportunity to reach new creative heights. “I just got back to work, doing what, in essence, got me the Grammy in the first place,” she says.
Joy’s Portrait is the followup to Linger Awhile, her 2022 breakthrough LP, and it represents the next phase in her continuing artistic evolution — unbound by expectations. Portrait documents the immersive, seemingly telepathic rapport she’s developed with her touring band, which includes musicians she learned her craft alongside while earning her degree; in fact, it wasn’t until college that Joy began to pursue jazz singing. On the strength of that cozy dynamic — on the road, “I’m among friends, which explains personal chemistry that translates to our live performances,” Joy says — the vocalist offers an album that honours heritage while staking out bold, singular territory. Whatever a rote, singer-with-sidemen record is, Portrait is not.
Joy co-produced Portrait with fellow Grammy winner Brian Lynch, a trumpeter and musical director who has been Eddie Palmieri’s most vital late-career collaborator, and was a member of the final lineup of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. The album was tracked in streamlined sessions — just two or three takes of each tune — at one of jazz’s most hallowed sites, Van Gelder Studio. “With this kind of band,” Joy says, “we play very close together on stage,” so the singer and Lynch recreated that vibe in the studio. The band recorded all together in that same room, feeding off each other’s energy as they would at a fiery live show. “It was the perfect place to capture this sound in its entirety,” Joy says.
Lynch, Joy raves, allowed her and the band to remain “in the driver’s seat, acting as our very supportive co-pilot.” The singer and her co-producer bonded over Abbey Lincoln’s 1961 LP Straight Ahead, on which the singer becomes enmeshed in a band with Max Roach, Booker Little, Eric Dolphy, Coleman Hawkins, Julian Priester and other greats. That LP, Joy says, “showed me what my role could be, and opened my ears to what was possible.”
As on that vocal-jazz touchstone, Joy is an integral part of an egalitarian octet featuring trumpeter Jason Charos, saxophonists David Mason and Kendric McCallister, trombonist Donavan Austin, pianist Connor Rohrer, bassist Felix Moseholm and drummer Evan Sherman. She soars above and out front, of course, but also functions as a pure instrument and a source of support and interplay. “I’m often the fifth voice,” she says, “the fifth horn. I just love the sound of this band. Hopefully, when people hear it they’ll realize that I’m a musician too.”
Highlighting Joy’s generous, all-for-one strategy as a leader — an influence gleaned from Blakey and Roach — Portrait boasts a uniquely synergistic approach to arranging. “I enjoy collaborating with fresh musical voices,” Joy says of her band, “because it not only helps all involved grow but helps to expand how musicians and audiences alike hear this music and what’s to come. So I wanted to put these creative minds in one place to expand the music and, as a result, each other.” Joy took the ever-evolving highlights from her concert songbook and gave them to individual band members to arrange, based on each player’s gifts and personality.
Portrait is also Joy’s most profound expression yet of her prowess as a songwriter — particularly as a lyricist of absolute poetic precision. It’s an inspired, surprising program that serves as a reminder of how the vocal-jazz repertoire can still break new ground while nodding to jazz history. On Reincarnation Of A Lovebird (Pursuit Of A Dream), Joy weds Charles Mingus’s tender tribute to Charlie Parker to her own mediation on “love so strong that it’s surreal.” Peace Of Mind / Dreams Come True matches Joy’s first original song and saxophonist Kendric McCallister, unpacking the anxieties she felt in her post-Grammy moment with the cosmic optimism of Sun Ra. “Now And Then (In Remembrance Of…) features Joy’s affecting words atop music by the late, great bebop sage Barry Harris, with whom Joy and McCallister studied. “It’s for Barry,” Joy says, “but it’s also for everybody in my life who is no longer here and yet I want to keep thinking of them, keep them present.”
Still, as might be expected given Joy’s track record with classic tunes, some of Portrait’s most impressive moments are the standards: Jason Charos’ arrangements of You Stepped Out Of A Dream and No More Blues (an exuberant palate cleanser on which Joy sings Jon Hendricks’ lyrics); McCallister’s take on Autumn Nocturne; David Mason’s Day By Day. Donavan Austin’s original A Fool In Love (Is Called A Clown) is so delightfully sentimental it might as well be a standard. Throughout, Joy sounds divine, evoking her idols while tapping into her rich background in a family of gospel and R&B renown. “I’m grateful to have so many tools at my disposal.”
Ultimately, Portrait is a masterwork that unspools the story of an ensemble — a band that coalesced as friends and musicians and has continued developing through stardom. “It’s just everything that I could have ever dreamed of in a band,” Joy says. “I hope we stay together for years to come. I really do.”
Joy cut her teeth as a singer in her church’s gospel choir. And while her family history is deeply musical — her grandparents helmed the Philadelphia gospel group The Savettes, and her father, the musician and songwriter Antonio McLendon, has produced, composed and arranged his own work — she didn’t delve into jazz until college. During her studies, she won the 2019 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, which introduced her as a rising star to watch. She was heard, by audiences and critics alike, as a masterful interpreter of standards and a rightful heiress of the sound, technique and charisma that defined her jazz heroines — including Vaughan, Betty Carter, Lincoln and Carmen McRae.”
