Samara Joy, 24-year-old jazz sensation
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2024
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jazz singer Samara Joy is just 24 years old. She has more than 1.3mn social media followers and three Grammys. Most notably, she won 2023’s best new artist award, only the second jazz musician ever to join that coveted club. Today, Lilah speaks with Samara about her path: discovering jazz, her thought process as she performs, and how she finds new takes on compositions by greats such as Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. They also discuss the challenges and pressure of being singular. Does she want to be considered the artist ‘bringing jazz to Gen Z’?
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We love hearing from you. Lilah is on Instagram @lilahrap and we’re on X @lifeandartpod. You can email us at lifeandart@ft.com. We are grateful for reviews, on Apple, Spotify etc.
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Links (all FT links get you past the paywall):
– Lilah’s HTSI profile of Samara, for which this conversation was recorded, is here: https://on.ft.com/3I9H4Kz
– The music video for Tight is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OkkyRkGSRY
– Samara is on TikTok @samarajoysings and Instagram @samarajoysings. You can see if she’s touring near you at www.samarajoy.com/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Life and Art from F.T. Weekend. |
| 0:05.9 | I'm Lila Raptopoulos. |
| 0:07.8 | Do you know something? |
| 0:10.4 | I'm in love with you. |
| 0:12.3 | You are hearing the voice of Samara Joy via her TikTok channel. |
| 0:16.6 | Samara is 24 years old. |
| 0:19.0 | She's a three-time Grammy Award winner, most recently for the single, tight. |
| 0:27.4 | This week, she is kicking off a four-month tour in Canada, Europe, and the West Coast of the U.S., |
| 0:34.9 | and all that is quite a place to be just two years out of college. |
| 0:39.5 | I recently interviewed Samara for a profile of her for our luxury magazine, HTSI. |
| 0:44.3 | And we started with the fact that Samara's only the second jazz artist in history |
| 0:48.6 | to win the coveted Grammy for Best New Artist. |
| 0:52.7 | Is that right, the second or the third? |
| 0:54.7 | The second, yes. |
| 0:55.8 | The first was as Franzis folding against Justin Bieber and Drake. |
| 0:58.8 | Yeah. |
| 0:59.4 | Nice. |
| 1:00.0 | That's good. |
| 1:00.7 | Nice. |
| 1:02.1 | So you're from New York, from the Bronx, born and raised. |
| 1:05.7 | You come from a very musical family. |
| 1:07.9 | Can you tell me about your journey of finding jazz as a singer? |
... |
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