This month: Samara Joy
At the age of 22, award-winning American singer Samara Joy is touring the US and Europe and recently celebrated her signing to Verve with the release of Linger Awhile, which is a fine set of well-chosen classic songs and tunes in the same way that Kind of Blue is quite a nice trumpet album.
Her voice and delivery have an astonishing maturity and both are very much her own, but she’s quick to acknowledge her influences in spirit. ‘Everything that I’ve learned so far, and continue to learn, about diving deep into the text of a song and singing in a way that hopefully connects with people comes from the singers that I listen to, like Carmen Mcrae, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald,’ she says. ‘Every time I listen to them I hear something different and it comes so naturally to them. I find my own ways of storytelling by listening to theirs.’ Her instinct for identifying material to which she can relate is something that she excels at transmitting to and thus sharing with listeners. ‘As long as I love the lyrics and the melody and the natural arc of a song,’ she explains, ‘I just gravitate towards it.’
Despite her enthusiasm for her chosen music, as a performer Joy is very much of her generation – many of her fans picked up on her via the rapid-fire online video platform Tiktok – which may be one reason why she feels equally at home on stage and in the studio. ‘When it comes to being in a studio I was always told to pretend that the microphone was the listener’s ear,’ she explains; ‘I hope that in the two situations I have the same energy.’
Her supportive family exposed her to a wide range of music including soul and gospel and for a while she took after her father as a player of the electric bass, but her reasons for choosing a career in jazz are both personal and succinct. ‘It’s the exposed, acoustic nature of the music,’ she concludes. ‘There’s nothing that comes between you and the song.’ Roger Thomas
‘I was always told to pretend the microphone was the listener’s ear’