Samara Joy, jazz is music for young people too
The song is a 1940s standard made famous in a jazz style by Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole, “You stepped out of a dream”. She plays a young African American singer. Listening to her with your eyes closed, you can be fooled into believing that she is a forgotten diva of that decade, with a deep and very warm voice. It’s not like that. Samara Joy, born in 1999, raised in the Bronx in New York, has half a million followers on Instagram, while on TikTok his videos have totaled 7 million “likes”. The singer is just 24 years old he has already won three Grammy Awards. To the two she took home last year, like “
Best Emerging Artist” (mocking i Maneskinwho in the week preceding the most awaited event in the world music biz had made the rounds of the main living rooms of American TV, intending to write history by becoming the first Italians to win the coveted prize) and as “Best Jazz Vocal Album” for his “Linger awhile”, this year he added the one as “Best Jazz Performance” for “Tight”. “Portrait”, her new album, out tomorrow, arrives eight months after yet another triumph and photographs the growth of the artist, here for the first time also in the role of composer, arranger and – even – bandleader, consecrating her as the face and emblem of Generation Z of world jazz which, between highly acclaimed records and gigantic numbers on the platforms, is slowly opening the doors of the genre to the very youngpeeling away clichés and clichés.
The album took shape in a series of very direct sessions – only two, maximum three takes for each song – hosted by one of the temples of jazz, the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jerseyonce frequented by John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones. Between the walls of the historic Samara Joy recording studio together with his musicians he tried to recreate that alchemy between the band members that characterizes the singer’s live performancesfrom trumpeter Jason Charos to trombonist Donavan Austin, from saxophonists David Mason and Kendric McCallister to pianist Connor Rohrer, from bassist Felix Moseholm to drummer Evan Sherman.
“.Eight musicians, eight vivid points of view from eight musical backgrounds, all united in a context designed to grow and explore, to put our pens and our minds to work to create music inspired by many, but ultimately indisputably ours”, says the 24-year-old singer, underlining how “Portrait” is a project “shaped, revised and refined over the course of a year on the road”. “I am often the fifth wind instrument – she explains – I hope listeners notice that I am also a musician”.
He thought about acting as a glue Brian Lynchtrumpeter and bandleader considered a point of reference on the contemporary jazz scene, highly appreciated for that versatility which over the course of his career led him to collect collaborations both with musicians such as Eddie Palmieri and Barbarito Torres of Buena Vista Social Club and with Prince and Sheila E. In “Portrait”, which comes out for the iconic Verve Recordsthe label for which Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Stan Getz, Bill Evans and Billie Holiday have recorded in the past, Samara Joy enjoyed writing lyrics on songs written by Charles Mingus, Sun Ra and Barry Harris, as well as reinterpreting standards made famous by legends like Vaughan, Charli Parker and Duke Ellington: “This is young music and they have done so much in their life to attract people to this type of music. It deserves to be discussed and shared. And as long as I’m passionate about it, my goal is to share it”, she claimed in an interview with the New York Times.
Coming from a family of musicians, Samara Joy grew up in the Bronx singing in gospel choirs, before attending some of the best music schools in the States, from Fordham High School for the Arts to Purchase College: “My mother and father gave me the opportunity to listen to lots of music, from Luther Vandross and Chaka Khan to George Duke and Stevie Wonder. To be honest, I had never heard of Sarah Vaughan before college. My friends were jazz fans and started playing me their favorite songs: when I heard his version of ‘Lover man’ I fell in love The inspiration comes from absorbing as much of their style as possible,” he said of the comparisons to Vaughan herself and Ella Fitzgerald.
“With this extraordinary album, a star with a silky voice was born,” wrote the trade magazine DownBeat when his debut with Verve, “Linger awhile,” was released in 2022. When she won the Grammy for “Best New Artist” last year, Samara Joy became the second jazz singer to win the award, twelve years after Esperanza Spalding’s consecration. Considering that in recent years artists loved by young people such as .Olivia Rodrigo or Billie Eilishfor contemporary jazz the event has taken on a special importance. And definitely promising.