The winner of two Grammys in 2023, Samara Joy McLendon is a jazz singer who shocked the media for her beautiful voice. At only 23 years old, Joy won Jazz Vocal Album for Linger Awhile, released in 2022, and Best New Artist.
Born in the Bronx, New York, Joy has been in touch with music since a young age. Her paternal grandparents, Elder Goldwire and Ruth McLendon, were the founders of Philadelphia’s gospel group The Savettes. She was introduced to gospel music by her father – a vocalist and bass player who has toured with the gospel musician Andraé Crouch – and started to sing in a church choir at 16 years old.
Joy went to Fordham High School for the Arts, where she participated in the jazz band of the institution. During this time, she achieved the title of Best Vocalist in the Essentially Ellington festival, a high school competition presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center. But she only had meaningful contact with the genre when she enrolled in a jazz program at SUNY’s Purchase College as a voice major and was named as an Ella Fitzgerald Scholar (a scholarship in the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation).
In 2019, under the name Samara McLendon, she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition and started a collaboration with Matt Pierson, a musical producer. The singer then released her first album, called Samara Joy in 2021, while she was still at college.
Joy’s social media started growing after viral videos on TikTok, reaching 200k followers on the platform. Partly on the strength of this success, she went on a tour through Europe (which had sold-out tickets in Italy and Austria). She toured in the United States as well, including a performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival and at Lincoln Center Summer For The City’s Jazz Underground.
In February of 2022, she made her first performance on Today Show, an American morning television show. This led her to a series of other presentations such as Carnegie Hall’s 16th Annual Notable Occasion, and Newport Jazz Festival and she was featured on jazz pianist Julius Rodriguez’s 2022 album Let Sound Tell All. And finally, in September of last year, Joy released her second album called Linger Awhile, by Verve Records.
After she won the category Best New Artist in the 2023 Grammys, Samara Joy faced tons of hate comments from Brazilians who wanted Anitta to win the award. Joy did not respond to the insults in her posts and continued spreading love and gratitude on her social media.
“To be here by just being myself, by just being who I was born as, I am so thankful.”, she said after winning her Grammy.
The article above was edited by Camila Lutfi.
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