Grammy-nominated jazz singer Samara Joy and her Philadelphia family of gospel singers will sing holiday songs in Ardmore

Samara Joy’s rise has been rapid.

In 2019, she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. That was just two years after she first sang the only two jazz songs she knew — Duke Ellington’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” and “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” — with her high school jazz band.

Since then, Joy, 23, has become the leading light of a new generation of classic-styled jazz vocalists. She’s released two albums: a self-titled debut, which came out in 2021 on Whirlwind Records, and this year’s Linger Awhile, on Verve.

The uncanny poise, sumptuous voice, and technical skill of the singer, who will perform at Ardmore Music Hall on Wednesday, Dec. 21, has gained notice outside jazz inner circles. Actress and director Regina King compared her to Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, helping lead to a Today Show appearance.

This month, Joy has been on The Kelly Clarkson Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and just completed a tour and New York home stand with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

She recorded her debut album while still a student in the Jazz Studies program at Fordham University, where she also wrote new lyrics for Fats Navarro’s “Nostalgia” for Linger Awhile as an assignment from one of her professors, trumpeter Jon Faddis.

And she’s up for Grammy Awards in February for both jazz vocal album and the prestigious best new artist, one of the Grammys’ four major awards.

As she goes from one never-expected experience to the next, “it all makes me pretty nervous,” says Joy, on the phone from her apartment in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood.

“But I think that’s good. It’s a good thing to be aware of the conditions around me and be part of the musical experience that we’re having that night — and night to night — rather than just being on autopilot.”

Joy grew up in the Bronx in New York but has deep musical roots in Philadelphia. In Ardmore, her show is billed as Samara Joy feat. The McLendon Family: A Joyful Holiday.

Her full name is Samara Joy McLendon, and the Philly-raised musicians performing the holiday music program with her on Wednesday will include her father, Antonio McLendon, a singer, songwriter, producer, and North Philly native who has toured with Andrae Crouch.

He joins her on the dazzling version of the 19th-century Christmas carol “O Holy Night,” that was recorded at Rittenhouse Soundworks in Philadelphia, and on a vocal duet video. Joy has a second new holiday song in “Warm In December,” originally sung by Julie London in 1956.

Joy admits that until she got to SUNY Purchase, she “didn’t know anything about jazz.” But she had a rich musical upbringing, hearing her father’s gospel and R&B music around the house.

As a teenager, Joy led the choir for three years at the World Changers Church in the Bronx. “I was there every Saturday and Sunday, at 15 years old singing for everybody. That was severely nerve-racking. But I’m very grateful for that time as well. That helped my develop my voice.”

It also connects her to aMcLendon family tradition. Joy’s grandparents Ruth McLendon and Elder Goldwire sang in The Savettes, a Philadelphia gospel group founded in the 1950s. Ruth McLendon, an operatic as well as a gospel singer, died in 2012, but Elder Goldwire, who is 92, will be in attendance at the Ardmore show.

The Savettes is a band name with double meaning, Antonio McLendon explains.

“My mother and a few other ladies started a savings group, like a financial group, called the Savettes. And then they turned it into a choir. It was like, ‘We can all sing, so why don’t we do something else while we’re putting our money together.’” Growing up, Joy heard stories about her grandparents driving a van called the Godmobile around Philadelphia, stopping on street corners to preach and sing.

Joy has been called “a throwback jazz singer with a TikTok sensibility,” a facile designation that’s typical of writing confused over the idea that someone so young can sound so mature.

“People are like, ‘your voice is like you have a 50-year-old woman living in your body.’ I’m like, ‘Alright, cool.’ But I’m appreciative … I take all the compliments as a good thing.”

And Joy is adept at TikTok. Earlier this month, she displayed skills as a mimic in a 26-second clip, doing rapid fire impressions of Ariana Grande, Whitney Houston, Ella Fitzgerald, and Beyoncé.

Joy’s jazz conversion moment was watching a video of Vaughan singing “Lover Man” in 1959. Along with Vaughan, Carmen McCrae is her favorite vocalist. She’s drawn to ballads like “Guess Who I Saw Today,” a 1952 song of infidelity written by Murray Grand and Elisse Boyd that she interprets on Linger Awhile.

“The band I’m playing with now, we’re here to make music together. We’re inspired by all these greats, but we have our own musicality to add. We’re alive, so we can do that.”

Joy’s relatives couldn’t have predicted her jazz trajectory but can hear the family in her voice. Her cousin Tommy Niblack, who will also be singing on Wednesday, says Joy sounds so much like her late aunt Beverly, who sang with the Savettes that “it’s uncanny. Her tone reminds everyone who knew her, of Beverly.”

“My sister passed a couple of months after Samara was born,” Antonio McLendon says. “She had cancer and she was too weak to hold Samara, so she asked me to hold her up to her face so she could kiss her.” Later, McLendon says, “when Samara started singing, I was like ‘Man, it’s like your Aunt Beverly just passed on everything she had to you, because you sound so much like her.’”

McLendon, who has worked up a new arrangement of “Joy to the World” for Wednesday, says that “my wife and I are extremely proud of the way Samara’s been carrying herself. Though we went through a rough patch when she was a teenager and she was playing at jazz clubs in New York that are open late at night. My perspective was, ‘can’t you find a way to sing in the afternoon?’”

The McLendons are on a mini-tour, but the Ardmore show is circled on the itinerary because of their Philadelphia history. “It’s a family affair,” Joy says. “We’re in deep. I can’t wait. We’re all very excited.”

“I started playing bass at 10 years old, and it was actually when Andrae Crouch’s came to play at a local church [in Philly] that his bass player inspired me to play bass,” Antonio McLendon says.

“So it was surreal to play with his band, years later. And to be able to be in the city where I got my beginning in music, and be back with my daughter, at this level? It’s a wonderful full-circle moment.”

Samara Joy feat. The McLendon Family: A Joyful Holiday. $20, 8 p.m., 12/21, Ardmore Music Hall, 23 East Lancaster Ave., Ardmore, ardmoremusichall.com.