The career of six-time Grammy Award-winning jazz singer Samara Joy is young, but packed. She began posting TikTok videos in 2020, performing jazz standards in her soulful, velvet-like contralto—clips that racked up millions of views and earned her such distinguished fans as Anita Baker and Regina King. Her self-titled debut album, recorded while she was still enrolled in the jazz program at State University of New York’s Purchase College, dropped in July 2021. In 2023, she won her first two Grammys, including Best New Artist.
But the inspiration driving this 26-year-old generational talent is much older than TikTok. Joy’s teachers aren’t just her musical family—her father is a gospel musician, as were his parents—or her mentors at Purchase. Her teachers are Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, who created, lived and died before she was born.
In a phone interview previewing her first-ever Vegas appearance at the Smith Center’s Reynolds Hall, she eagerly talks about the late, great Carmen McRae: “There’s something so clever and musical about the way that she sings. … She doesn’t have to do anything super fancy. She just gets right to the heart of the song and the heart of the lyric, as if she’s lived it a hundred times.”
Teachers like McRae, among other greats, speak directly into Joy’s heart and soul. She talks about the first time she heard Clifford Brown and Max Roach’s 1954 live recording of the ballad “I Can’t Get Started,” and was “entranced.”
“[Brown’s] playing the song, but he’s not playing the melody as it’s written, note for note and rhythm for rhythm,” Joy says. “It was the most liberated sound I’ve ever heard. He was improvising the whole time, and yet it sounded so incredibly tender and lyrical and melodic. ...Everything that I love about Sarah Vaughan, about Betty Carter, about Max Roach, about Bird, it’s all a part of how I now interpret music. People can hear that, but also how I made it my own. We can only imitate so much before it’s time to get creative.”
She’s eager to perform those inherited, reinterpreted sounds, from her transcendent versions of “Guess Who I Saw Today” and “’Round Midnight” to the music from her latest Grammy-winning album, 2024’s Portrait, along with material she and her band have worked out on the road. But above all, she’s coming here to share from that instructive and inspiring legacy, and to add her own notes.
“I’ve had now five years [of] being put in so many different situations that have helped me to grow and be more confident in sharing the music that I love in a way that connects with people, no matter where we are,” she says. “It has allowed me to become a better performer, a better artist, better at sharing and expressing myself spontaneously. I want to keep doing it because I feel confident in it, but also, I feel like there’s room to grow.”
SAMARA JOY April 10, 7:30 p.m., $52-$160. Reynolds Hall, thesmithcenter.com.
