JENNA OUTCALT
Staff Writer
Jazz singer Samara Joy said that she is seeing a renewed interest in jazz because of nostalgia, or a “what’s old is new again” attitude.
“I think [jazz] has always been active, but in public perception, it seems to be having a revival,” she said in an interview with CLASH magazine. “But it’s always been alive.”
Joy will sing at 8 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater, evoking a variety of genre influences and iconic inspirations in her jazz performance.
She has won six Grammy Awards: one for Best New Artist, two for Best Jazz Performance and three for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Most recently, Joy won a Grammy for her 2024 album Portrait.
“This album was about following my gut even when everybody didn’t see the vision,” she said in her Grammy acceptance speech.
Joy did not start singing jazz until her freshman year of college at SUNY Purchase College, she said in a Salt Lick Sessions interview.
“I was introduced to it in my senior year of high school, but I was not interested at that time, just because that’s not where my musical interests were leaning,” she said in the interview. “But when I got to the conservatory and I was surrounded by not only peers who were really passionate and knew so much about the recordings and about the people who made it what it is, but the professors who taught us about something they were also a part of.”
Joy said being around professionals who played with jazz legends and had their own reputations in the jazz sphere “opened up a completely new world” for her.
“I loved singers growing up, I was surrounded by them,” she said in the Salt Lick Sessions interview. “But it just gave me an opportunity to learn how to sing a different way, you know? Not forgetting or removing any of the influences that make me who I am, but just adding onto it in a new way and sort of trying to evoke the same kind of emotion I felt when I heard Sarah Vaughan singing for the first time, or
Ella Fitzgerald.”
Joy said in the same interview that she had to intentionally listen to jazz and its foundational elements to immerse herself in the genre.
“Because I have the influence of R&B and gospel and soul music, I find that adding the layer of jazz onto my musical identity, it just allowed me to get to the heart of a song and it allowed me to utilize all the tools at my disposal, but I wanted it to be authentic, because singing jazz is kind of like singing any other genre,” she said. “You have to listen.”
Joy said in the interview that her music is ever-changing because jazz requires that she be creative and “never stay stagnant.”
“Every time you hear me or my band, expect something different. Expect a change, even if it’s slight, even if it’s small or even if it’s big,” she said. “There will be something different about every performance because the nature of this music requires you to grow.”
Joy also said in the CLASH magazine interview that she prefers live performances to recording music in a studio because of their fluidity.
“I prefer performing live, because I’m not necessarily seeking for it to be perfect. It just has to be special for this night and unique for this experience, for this audience,” she said.
Joy told CLASH that each of her three albums “is a picture” of who and where she was when she wrote it.
“I think that I’ve become a lot more confident in my ideas since the first album, although I think the through line between all three is that the majority of the repertoire I chose was just because it was what I was singing or learning or listening to at the time,” she said.
Joy emphasized in the Salt Lick Sessions interview that music is a vessel for hope in troubled times.
“We’re one small part in a bigger picture of carrying a certain tradition forward, of creativity and not losing hope and losing that creativity just because times are hard, but allowing that to fuel our passions even further for our common humanity and for making this world a better place,” she said.
