Blessed with a voice as warm, supple and velvety as the greatest singers in jazz, Samara Joy doesn’t need to worry about pandering to an audience.
Since her 2019 triumph at the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition and her six Grammy Award wins, including for best new artist in 2023, the 26-year-old has become Gen Z’s breakout jazz vocal star, complete with more than 700,000 followers on TikTok.
That instinct was on full display at her debut performance with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall on Tuesday, Sept. 8, which proved to be a master class in repertoire curation.
It was an exciting start to the Symphony’s 2026-2027 season. Joy has mostly eschewed American Songbook standards in favor of “deep cuts” that she’s honed with her band to diamond sharpness. She seemed utterly at home in the hall, and her septet was well-integrated into the orchestra, conducted with acute sensitivity by guest conductor Anthony Parnther.
Joy spent much of the concert paying tribute to the singers who have influenced her style, but on her own terms. The two-hour concert’s first half was impressive, paced by a breakneck arrangement of Betty Carter’s cautionary “Beware My Heart.” Still more ingénue than femme fatale, Joy feinted at Carter’s romantic cynicism, quipping “falling in love is a lack of information.”
The set’s high point was “Sunset and The Mocking Bird,” a Duke Ellington gem popularized as an instrumental piece favored by the late piano master Tommy Flanagan. But with lyrics by New York jazz vocalist Laura Camara, it’s become a Joy tour-de-force. With her cello-like chest tone accentuated by alto saxophonist David Mason’s cello-centric orchestration, Joy shaped the song with dynamic shifts, ranging from a caressing coo to a forceful, vaulting cry.
The orchestration for tenor saxophonist Kendric McCallister’s lyric-less “Five Stages of Love” was less successful, with overactive timpani that crossed the line from telegraphic to cheesy.
The concert’s emotional centerpiece paired one of Billy Strayhorn’s earliest songs, the precociously jaded masterpiece “Lush Life,” with her own lyrical setting for a septet version of the persuasively swinging “U.M.M.G.”
Ever since Nat King Cole introduced “Lush Life” with his 1949 recording, it’s typically been delivered with quiet defeat as a saloon art song dripping with regret and self-pity. McCallister’s arrangement and Mason’s orchestration turned the song into a cinematic sojourn through the five stages of grief, full of twists, rebounds and rage, with Joy practically roaring at an ex-lover’s “siren song.”
To add a sheer emotional punch, Joy’s rendition of Billie Holiday’s “Left Alone,” landed like a heavyweight blow. While Holiday never recorded the song, her last pianist, Mal Waldron, provided the music, and it’s a wonder it isn’t performed more often.
Dewy and resplendent, Joy’s voice couldn’t be more different than Holiday’s, but her unadorned delivery of the devastating line, “First they hurt me, then desert me,” evoked the vulnerability that made Holiday a nonpareil artist. The audience rose to its feet as she finished, swept up in Joy’s tender embrace of her foremother.
Joy closed the evening with Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” a piece indelibly linked to gospel great Mahalia Jackson. A singer reared in church, Joy performed it as a prayer and benediction framed by the low reeds and basses. It was a perfect case of Joy’s bandstand savvy, ending with a spiritual plea.
Andrew Gilbert is a freelance writer. This review has been provided in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
