RELATED: Black Music Sunday: The future of jazz looks bright, thanks to Black women around the world
Speaking of joy, my first selection today is music from Samara Joy McClendon who records and performs as simply Samara Joy.
Samara is still relatively new to jazz. Growing up in the Bronx, it was music of the past — the music of her parent’s childhoods, as she put it — that she listened to most. She treasures her musical lineage, which stretches back to her grandparents Elder Goldwire and Ruth McLendon, both of whom performed with Philadelphia gospel group the Savettes, and runs through her father, who is a singer, songwriter and producer who toured with gospel artist Andraé Crouch. “Sometimes I catch myself when I’m singing — I’m like, ‘Whoa, that was a dad moment’,” Samara quips. Eventually, she did follow in the family tradition, singing in church and then with the jazz band at Fordham High School for the Arts, with whom she won Best Vocalist at JALC’s Essentially Ellington competition. That led to her enrolling in SUNY Purchase’s jazz studies program, where she fell deeply in love with the music.
Though she’s young, she relishes the process of digging through the music’s history and learning new standards. “I think maybe people connect with the fact that I’m not faking it, that I already feel embedded in it,” Samara says. “Maybe I’m able to reach people in person and on social media because it’s real.” The gatekeepers of the jazz world tend to agree: in 2019, she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, and she’s since performed with legends like Christian McBride and Bill Charlap. Legendary late pianist Barry Harris was a particularly important influence and mentor. “You inspired me as well as many others with this fire for teaching and playing that couldn’t be dimmed by anything or anyone,” Samara writes in Linger Awhile’s liner notes, dedicating the project in part to Harris’ memory.
She introduces herself in this short clip, mentioning the fact that her TikTok following helped build her audience.
Video journalist Brian Pace interviewed Joy for his program “The Pace Report” in February of 2022.
Samara’s self-titled debut album (Whirlwind Records) is on heavy rotation on jazz radio all over the world and features the Pasquale Grasso Trio. She brings a new and fresh and exciting take on songs of the great American songbook with standards like “Moonglow,” “Stardust,” and “Everything Happens To Me.” Samara attended Fordham High School of the Arts in the Bronx and recently graduated from SUNY Purchase where she studied under the great Kenny Washington and Jon Faddis. In 2019 she won the prestigious Sarah Vaughn Vocal Competition where she gained the attention of famed record producer, Matt Pierson. At 22 years young, Samara’s performed with the likes of Cyrus Chestnut, Kirk Lightest, Christian McBride, Emmet Cohen, and Christian McBride.
Some of you may have caught her September 2022 appearance on The Today Show.
Joy was also recently featured on the podcast The Takeaway hosted by Melissa Harris Perry. Give it a listen.
I have always loved both Carmen McCrae’s and Nancy Wilson’s renditions of “Guess Who I Saw Today,” written by Murray Grand with lyrics from Elisse Boyd for Leonard Sillman’s Broadway musical New Faces of 1952. Joy takes it on, and makes it her own.
In an interview with Joy she was asked about two other young contemporary Black female jazz artists, and what she thought about them. She replied that they were her “big sisters.”
Meet Jazzmeia Horn. Her Concord record label has some background—and yes, her name really is Jazzmeia.
Blessed with a fitting name for her chosen path—it was Horn’s jazz-loving, piano-playing grandmother who chose “Jazzmeia”—the singer was born in Dallas in 1991, grew up in a tightly knit, church-going family filled with musical talent and started singing as a toddler. She attended Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts, known for launching such musical greats as Roy Hargrove, Norah Jones, and Erykah Badu. Her education included steering herself to the mentors who would guide her passion for jazz, like Bobby McFerrin, Abbey Lincoln, and Betty Carter.
In 2009, Horn moved to New York City to enroll in The New School’s jazz and contemporary music program. An intense four years of training and performing followed, when she met many of the musicians who appear on her recordings, including [Victor] Gould and [Stacy] Dillard. In short order, her talent began to be noticed. In 2013, she entered and won a Newark-based contest named for an initial inspiration—the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Competition. In 2015, she won the Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Competition, the most coveted award a jazz musician can hope to attain. Part of her prize was a contract with Concord, which led to A Social Call and now Love and Liberation.
Seattle radio station KEKP-FM host Larry Mizell, Jr. featured Horn performing live in the KEXP studio, on Dec. 7, 2021.
Last, but certainly not least, is Cécile McLorin Salvant. Salvant was featured in Fred Kaplin’s 2017 New Yorker review titled “Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Timeless Jazz” which details her background, and describes the lead-up to her winning the prestigious 2010 Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz International Vocals Competition.
It was only because of a series of flukes that she became a jazz singer at all. Cécile Sophie McLorin Salvant was born in Miami on August 28, 1989. She began piano lessons at four and joined a local choir at eight, all the while taking in the music that her mother played on the stereo—classical, jazz, pop, folk, Latin, Senegalese. At ten, she saw Charlotte Church, a pop-culture phenomenon just a few years older, singing opera on a TV show. “This girl was making people cry with her singing,” Salvant recalled, sitting in her apartment, a walkup on a block of brownstones in Harlem. “I was attracted by how she could tap into emotions like that. I said, ‘I want to do that, too.’ ”
She grew up in a French-speaking household: her father, a doctor, is Haitian, and her mother, who heads an elementary school, is French. At eighteen, Cécile decided that she wanted to live in France, so she enrolled at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory, in Aix-en-Provence, and at a nearby prep school that offered courses in political science and law. Her mother, who came along to help her get settled, saw a listing for a class in jazz singing and suggested that Cécile sign up.
While studying with jazz musician Jean-François Bonnel, her mother had her record and submit an audition track to the Monk competition and she became one of 12 semifinalists, out of 237 applicants.
Salvant launched into “Bernie’s Tune,” a cool-bop anthem by Gerry Mulligan, followed by “Monk’s Mood,” a knotty melody by Thelonious Monk, and “Take It Right Back,” a raucous Bessie Smith blues. “She had people eating out of her hand—it was ridiculous,” Al Pryor, the A. & R. chief at Mack Avenue Records, who was also in the house, recalled. “I knew that I had to sign her up.” Rodney Whitaker, the bassist hired for the rhythm section that accompanied the contestants, knew she was going to win even during the pre-show rehearsal. “I’d never met anyone that young who’d figured out how to channel the whole history of jazz singing and who had her own thing, too,” he later told me. She and two other women made it into the finals. The next day, after a second round of competition, at the Kennedy Center, Salvant was declared the winner.
Here’s her 2018 NPR Tiny Desk Concert.
Standing behind the Tiny Desk with only pianist Sullivan Fortner by her side, jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant remarked that she hadn’t been this nervous in a while. But it was hard to tell: She embraced the discomfort with ease, taking command of the space with a calm demeanor and spiritual presence that felt both humble and persuasive. From listening to McLorin Salvant’s exquisite performance here, I also couldn’t tell that when she was 15, she was listening to Alice in Chains, sported a Mohawk and was into what she calls “radical feminist punk stuff,” as she told NPR after the performance. “Sometimes I still really like Bikini Kill, and I still have my little Pearl Jam grunge moments.” What can be heard in each song is a seasoned jazz singer with a vast vocal range, meticulous technical execution and a superb classical vocal foundation, which actually began when she was just 8.
Her background in classical piano is evident in the inventive harmonic and melodic construction of the first three songs heard here; all are romantically themed McLorin Salvant compositions from her third album, For One to Love, recorded in 2015. The record won her a 2016 Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album.
McLorin Salvant closes with “Omie Wise,” an American folk song that tells the tragic story of murder victim Naomi Wise and her husband and killer, John Lewis:
Then pushed her in deep waters where he knew that she would drown
He jumped on his pony and away he did ride.
The screams of little Omie went down by his side.
Feminist themes are common in McLorin Salvant’s music, and while “Omie Wise” addresses gender-based violence, she says she sings difficult songs like this to address an important historical legacy. “We don’t sing to our kids and we don’t know any of our folk music anymore,” McLorin Salvant says. “But like all of the history of race songs, coon songs, minstrel music, music from Vaudeville, all of that is like, ‘No, we’re not going to address that — that’s too ugly.'”
I’ll close with a track from her newest album Ghost Song:
I may be closing this story—but join me in the comments section below for more music, and as always I welcome your additions.
Denise Oliver Velez
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