Grammy-winning jazz singer returns for Tucson encore

At some point in the future, jazz singer Samara Joy would like to take a moment and reflect on what a crazy, exciting, wild ride she’s been on since she released her eponymous debut album three short years ago.

Her 2022 sophomore album “Linger Awhile” on the jazz behemoth Verve Records earned her Grammys for Best Jazz Vocal Album, Best Jazz Performance and Best New Artist in 2023.

Not best new jazz artist; Best New Artist. Of all genres.

“I didn’t expect for the second album, ‘Linger Awhile,’ to do so well. I expected it to be a stepping stone in my career, for sure, but I did not expect for any of what happened to happen,” the 24-year-old said during a late September interview from a concert stop in Mesa.

Joy, who played a soldout Tucson Jazz Festival show at Rialto Theatre weeks before the Grammy ceremonies in January 2023, returns for a concert at Fox Tucson Theatre on Thursday, Oct. 31, with her just-released third album “Portrait.”

Over three days in February, she and her band of rising young jazz musicians recorded a collection of jazz standards with their original arrangements, including “You Stepped Out of a Dream,” “No More Blues” and “Day by Day.”

She also wrote lyrics to a couple of standards where none had existed, including Nogales, Arizona, native Charles Mingus’s “Reincarnation of a Lovebird.”

“For the first maybe two or three or four months of me trying to write lyrics to this song, I think I only had the first line because I was still trying to figure out how to sing the melody and learning the melody,” she recalled. “It was a completely different way of writing and a completely different song form. Adding lyrics to it required me to put the song on over and over and over again and try to understand the format and the meaning of the song before I tried to put lyrics on top of it.”

She also wanted to make sure that her lyrics didn’t compete with Mingus’s melody.

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“I don’t want it to sound unnatural. It was a challenge but it was beautiful and now it’s one of my favorite songs to sing,” she said.

Joy, who grew up surrounded by gospel and came to jazz in high school, had her first meaningful encounter with the genre when she enrolled as a voice major in the jazz program at SUNY’s Purchase College.

“Going into a jazz studies college you would think I would know a little bit more about the music, but I had no background in it whatsoever,” she said. “It turned out that was the perfect place for me to be able to immerse myself in the music and that’s where I ironically ended up falling in love with it.”

Joy was immediately struck by the authentic and collaborative nature of jazz, which explains why she created a band for “Portrait.” She added horns and a drum, bass, guitar and keyboards to create that big orchestra sound. She invited the musicians to contribute arrangements and she wrote some lyrics as well as an original song. On every song, she wanted the eight musicians to sound like they numbered 20.

When they went into the studio last February, Joy said she wasn’t thinking about how to go bigger and better than “Linger Awhile;” she was thinking, “How do I make this as organically as the first two.”

“I didn’t go into the studio thinking, ‘This is going to be a hit; I’m here to make hits.’ I’m here for the music and hopefully people will enjoy that at every stage,” she said.

The album has added more to the argument that Joy is jazz’s millennial generation ambassador, bringing younger audiences to a genre often considered for Boomers or Gen Xers. Joy is seen as the next-gen Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald, with a nuanced, passion-filled voice that dares you to say differently.

“It’s pretty incredible,” she said of where her career has gone in such a short time. “I think sometimes I don’t even get the opportunity to sit back and think about it because it so quickly became my life. Sitting back and reflecting on it, it’s pretty wild to think about. But at the same time, there was a young Charles Mingus making his mark on music. There was a young Dizzy Gillespie, or a young Sarah Vaughan or whoever, that came out and put their individual stamp on the music they love. Maybe I’m following in their footsteps in that way.”

Joy is set to go on stage at the Fox, 17 W. Congress St., at 7:30 p.m. Tickets ($20-$79.50) are limited through foxtucson.com.