Samara Joy

• Reduced mobility
• Magnetic loop

When you look at photographs of her, she looks like a fulfilled and content woman, someone for whom everything is starting to work out just right. And in her interviews, she seems to speak with the self-assured demeanour that people in the music business tend to have when they break into the big time. Samara Joy has recently received many important and varied awards from the recording industry, including the coveted Grammys. Analysts prone to grandiloquence have begun to call her the First Lady of Vocal Jazz of our time, not perhaps without certain justification. Whatever such people may think, the truth is that it is impossible not to listen to her music without falling under the spell of her refreshing voice.

Raised in Castle Hill, in the Bronx, Samara Joy McLendon was born into a family of musicians fascinated by gospel music. That she would pursue a career in music was therefore a foregone conclusion. In 2019, at the age of twenty, she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, where she performed under her real name, Samara McLendon. Shortly afterwards, producer Matt Pierson recorded her first album Samara Joy while she was still at university – she graduated magna cum laude in 2021.

When the album was released later that same year, Jazz Times named Samara Best New Artist. Around this time, a number of her performances appeared on social media, and her videos went viral with millions of views. By November 2022, these videos had earned her 200,000 followers on TikTok, and thanks in part to this success, she embarked on a tour of the United States, performing at the Monterey Jazz Festival, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Winter Jazzfest, and, across the pond at different venues throughout Europe.

Her second album Linger Awhile was released in September 202, on the multinational Verve label, and in February this year she won the most coveted award that any music professional can aspire to these days: two Grammys: Best Jazz Vocal Album, for this album, and Best New Artist. She comes to JAZZMADRID to present the songs from the album; a generous handful of jazz standards in which the delicate caress of her timbre and the ineffable warmth of her delivery stand out. Not to mention, as is always the case with Samara’s concerts, a very special and carefully crafted stage production. This singer has a very bright future ahead of her.