A gamechanger on the city scene when it launched in 1994, Symphony Center’s esteemed jazz series celebrates its 30th season this year.
Its opening headliner, last Friday? She turns 24 next month.
That singer is Samara Joy, who has ascended from college graduate to performing on jazz’s most prestigious stages in just two years. Earlier this year, Joy’s sophomore album, “Linger Awhile,” earned her Grammys for best jazz vocal album and best new artist overall, making her the first jazz musician so recognized since Esperanza Spalding’s win in 2011. Not since Cécile McLorin Salvant has a vocalist so completely and galvanizingly gripped the genre. Joy’s plummy middle-low register, able to heat up even the palatial Orchestra Hall like a hearth, courts comparisons to Sarah Vaughan. When playfully ping-ponging up and down her register, there’s a sprinkle of Ella Fitzgerald.
But Samara is Samara. Hers could be a voice from another time, if her bio and onstage comments didn’t mention TikTok, where she’s cultivated a significant slice of her fan base.
Joy, of course, is still young, meaning her instrument will change. But the idea of her soulful, effortlessly acrobatic voice ripening further is like imagining the California redwoods after a surprise growth spurt. On Friday, after an upwards-shimmying flourish in “Guess Who I Saw Today” — a Joy calling card that she’s masterfully mashed up with Stevie Wonder’s “Lately” in recent months — I wondered, honestly and without exaggeration: Is there anything her voice can’t do?
But grow, she does. Those who attended Friday’s Symphony Center concert after any of Joy’s three local appearances last year would have witnessed the same artist in 4-D. From her first a cappella passages onstage — a vocalese on Mingus’s “Reincarnation of a Lovebird,” featuring Joy’s own lyrics — Joy gave us a speed-run through her register, from that gold-mine chest voice to floated wisps at the summit of her range. Even when her seven-piece band entered, she easily sailed over them, her voice operatic in its hall-filling heft and sturdy vibrato.
It’s not just Joy’s voice that’s preternaturally mature: The girl knows how to work a crowd. As the band vamped behind her, Joy seamlessly flowed from introductory comments into Benny Carter’s “A Kiss from You” with the ease of a seasoned performer. Later, she went out of her way to welcome a bloc of DePaul students in the audience (seated a few rows behind me in the lower balcony, judging by their delighted yelps) and impishly wondered if the university would consider letting her graduate with them, after COVID tanked her own ceremony at SUNY Purchase.
That moment — the DePaul shoutout — spoke volumes. Joy, overnight star that she is, could tour with industry hotshots of her choosing. Instead, she’s made a point of sharing her well-deserved good fortune with other precocious young talents. Her current bandmates are mostly other 20-somethings fresh out of school: trombonist Donavan Austin, tenor saxophonist Kendric McCallister and bassist Michael Migliore all attended Purchase with Joy, and trumpeter Jason Charos and alto saxophonist David Mason, alums of the University of Miami’s Frost School, are also in their early 20s.
Rather than toss off crowd-pleasers from her two studio albums (a third holiday EP was released the day of the concert), her Friday set centered her bandmates’ handiwork. Austin, the trombonist, is also a bard of exuberant, off-kilter arrangements — a funky asymmetric horn codetta in “Kiss from You,” and a sultry original, “A Fool in Love Is Called a Clown.” Austin’s compositional chops are such that one could guess he was the arranger behind Friday’s version of Ronnell Bright’s “Sweet Pumpkin” long before Joy announced it onstage.
Trumpeter Charos is also a mean arranger, penning a rhythmically vital reimagining of Horace Silver’s “Nica’s Dream” (again with original lyrics by Joy). A key-spanning marvel of dexterity and chromaticism, the sensational 20-year-old pianist Cameron Campbell shone here and in Joy’s now-signature uptempo rendition of “Tight.” One wouldn’t be surprised to see McCallister get nabbed by a major act soon, too: His teeming, often impressionistic tenor solos snagged the ear again and again on Friday.
Joy ended with Axel Stordahl, Paul Weston and Sammy Cahn’s tune “Day by Day,” smilingly tweaking the chorus to “Day by day / I’m falling more in love with Chicago …” Day by day, who can’t help but fall more in love with Samara Joy, too?
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
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