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With a voice as smooth as velvet, Samara Joy’s star seems to rise with each performance. Following her win at the prestigious Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, Samara recorded her 2021 debut album — backed with a trio led by the virtuosic guitar of Pasquale Grasso.
“A young singer with the level of talent that only surfaces once in a blue moon.”
Although having only recently celebrated her 21st birthday, Samara has already performed in many of the great jazz venues in NYC, including Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, The Blue Note, and Mezzrow, in addition to working with jazz greats such as Christian McBride, Pasquale Grasso, Kirk Lightsey, Cyrus Chestnut, and NEA Jazz Master Dr. Barry Harris.
“Joy’s approach is so natural, confident, and easygoing that it’s impossible not to like her.”
Growing up in New York, music was a pervasive presence, due to the inspiration of her paternal grandparents, Elder Goldwire and Ruth McLendon, who led the well-known Philadelphia-based gospel group, The Savettes. Her father toured with the renowned Gospel artist Andrae Crouch, and her home was filled with the sounds of not only her father’s songs and songwriting process, but the inspiration of many Gospel and R&B artists, including Stevie Wonder, Lalah Hathaway, George Duke, Musiq Soulchild, Kim Burrell, Commissioned, and many others.
“Although I didn’t grow up singing in church,” explains Samara, “I constantly heard my family singing inspirational music together, which instilled in me an appreciation for my musical lineage. Through musicals in middle school, I loved exploring the range of my voice and applying the different colors to fit the characters I played. Finally, during high school, I joined the choir at my church, eventually becoming a worship leader, singing three services a week for nearly two years. That was my training.”
“The close precision and frothy power of her voice stand out immediately.”
“Her understated, swingy rhythm can feel lighter than air. There’s also the attention she pays a witty, poetic or heartfelt lyric without overselling it.”
Samara’s first exposure to jazz was while attending Fordham High School for the Arts, where she performed regularly with the jazz band, eventually winning Best Vocalist at JALC’s Essentially Ellington competition. However, jazz wasn’t really her focus until the time came to choose a college. Wanting to attend a state school close to home, she picked SUNY Purchase, gaining acceptance into their acclaimed jazz program, with a faculty that includes many jazz masters (including Pasquale Grasso and drummer Kenny Washington, who both appear on her debut recording.)
“Pasquale Grasso is a guitarist with the most phenomenal technique and an endless flow of ideas.”
“My friends were all into jazz and started sharing their favorite recordings with me to check out. The turning point was when I heard both Sarah Vaughan’s version of ‘Lover Man’ and Tadd Dameron’s recordings featuring trumpeter Fats Navarro. I was hooked.”
From this point, she began to pursue her jazz studies with an intense passion, eventually being named the Ella Fitzgerald Scholar and entering and winning the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition.
“The most exciting jazz vocal debut for some time.”
Samara's self-titled debut recording released on July 9, 2021 through Whirlwind Recordings. It presents her backed by the trio of guitarist Pasquale Grasso, bassist Ari Roland, and drummer Kenny Washington. Within the album's liner notes, veteran writer Will Friedwald comments that Samara Joy is “a fantastic collection of highly original new arrangements, beautifully sung by a rising talent, and a very impressive first album. People are forever using the word 'timeless' as if it were the greatest praise ever, but in a way, Samara’s voice and her music seem to belong to all time, like she’s connected to the entire history of jazz all at once - as if she were existing in every era simultaneously, she sounds both classic and contemporary.”
Winning the Vaughan award was transformational for Joy. “I was suddenly on the jazz radar. It’s still bizarre to think of how fast things have progressed.” Since then, Joy has dug deep to discover her jazz roots, without losing sight of the innate simplicity that makes her sound shine. Her first album announces the arrival of a young artist destined for greatness.
“Classic American song in safe young hands.”
About Pasquale Grasso
It was the kind of endorsement most rising guitarists can only dream of, and then some. In his interview for Vintage Guitar magazine’s February 2016 cover story, Pat Metheny was asked to name some younger musicians who’d impressed him. “The best guitar player I’ve heard in maybe my entire life is floating around now, Pasquale Grasso,” said the jazz-guitar icon and NEA Jazz Master. “This guy is doing something so amazingly musical and so difficult.
“A technically brilliant guitarist displaying raw talent at every turn.”
“Mostly what I hear now are guitar players who sound a little bit like me mixed with a little bit of John Scofield and a little bit of Bill Frisell,” he continued. “What’s interesting about Pasquale is that he doesn’t sound anything like that at all. In a way, it is a little bit of a throwback, because his model—which is an incredible model to have—is Bud Powell. He has somehow captured the essence of that language from piano onto guitar in a way that almost nobody has ever addressed. He’s the most significant new guy I’ve heard in many, many years.”
As he’s done with many rising jazz stars, Metheny later invited Grasso over to his New York pad to jam and share some wisdom. He’s since become a generous presence in Grasso’s life, and his assessment of Grasso’s playing is—no surprise—spot-on. Born in Italy and now based in New York City, the 30-year- old guitarist has developed an astounding technique and concept informed not by jazz guitarists so much as by bebop pioneers like Powell, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and the classical-guitar tradition. His new digital-only EP series, available beginning in June from Sony Masterworks, showcases Grasso in the solo-guitar format, where his intensive studies of both midcentury jazz and classical meld into a signature mastery that is, remarkably, at once unprecedented and evocative.
But whom does it evoke? After a surface listen, Joe Pass and his essential Virtuoso LPs might come to mind. Now listen again. The sparkling, immaculately balanced tone; the tasteful tinges of stride and boogie-woogie rhythm; the stunning single-note lines that connect his equally striking use of chordal harmony—for Grasso, great solo arranging equals Art Tatum.
“When he’s not dazzling listeners with technical feats and creative spark, Grasso enraptures them with oceans of smooth harmonic motion and all-enveloping sonic auras.”
Many serious guitar heads have been hip to Grasso for a while now and are aware of his jaw-dropping online performance videos, his beautiful custom instrument -- built in France by Trenier Guitars -- and his early career triumphs. In 2015, he won the Wes Montgomery International Jazz Guitar Competition in New York City, taking home a $5,000 prize and performing with guitar legend Pat Martino’s organ trio. Last year at D.C.’s Kennedy Center, as part of the NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert, Grasso participated in a special performance to honor Pat Metheny, alongside his guitar-wunderkind peers Dan Wilson, Camila Meza, Gilad Hekselman and Nir Felder.
These days, Grasso teaches and maintains a packed gig schedule around New York, including frequent solo performances at the popular Greenwich Village haunt Mezzrow, where a regular Monday-night gig allowed him to develop his solo-arranging skillset. Not that Grasso thinks his work is done. “All [of the musicians I love are] inspiration for me to get new ideas and form my style, because it’s still growing,” Pasquale says. “And it’s gonna be growing until the day I die.”
“See for yourself the remarkable technical skill and artistic vision that Grasso brings to each performance.”
How Grasso came to be such a tremendous talent is also, in many ways, the story of his older brother, Luigi Grasso, a gifted alto saxophonist who tours globally as a bandleader and collaborator. The brothers were born and raised in Ariano Irpino, a bucolic hillside town in Italy’s Campania region. Their parents, while not being musicians themselves, were nonetheless passionate music lovers who filled the family home with jazz and classical sounds and took their sons along to events like Umbria Jazz. “Instead of watching TV at night,” Grasso recalls, “my dad would put on a Chet Baker record and we’d listen.”
Both boys started in music young. Luigi, suffering from asthma, began playing sax on the advice of a doctor who believed it would help the 6-year-old with his breathing. Pasquale decided not much later that he needed to play an instrument too, and when he browsed a local shop, the guitar caught his interest immediately. Dad happily bought the instrument, but not before striking a deal with his son: “If I buy this for you, you have to promise me that you’ll practice.” In the ensuing years Pasquale kept up his end of the bargain, as did his brother, hour after hour, every day. Grasso’s mother later bought a book on how to read music, teaching her sons the skill as she absorbed it herself.
Grasso found his first important mentor in Agostino Di Giorgio, a New York-raised guitarist who’d moved to Italy as an adult, to take care of his aging grandparents. Di Giorgio, a spirited, hilarious character and a brilliant musician, was a star pupil to Chuck Wayne, the deeply influential guitarist and educator recognized for his work with Woody Herman, George Shearing and Tony Bennett, among many others. Di Giorgio helped Wayne to codify his distinctive concepts of chords and scales in two highly sought-after books and passed Wayne’s methods along to Grasso. In the summer of 1998, the brothers attended a jazz workshop with bebop-piano royal Barry Harris in Switzerland. Harris showed both boys great kindness, and a relationship was quickly formed. Eventually, the Grasso brothers went from students at Harris’ global lineup of workshops to being two of his right-hand instructors and assistants. To this day, if Pasquale doesn’t have a gig on Tuesday night, he’ll drop in on Harris’ marathon teaching sessions in Manhattan to learn something new.
“When you hear what sounds like two guitars playing together and then discover there’s only one, you can be pretty sure it’s in the hands of Pasquale Grasso.”
Harris’ guidance helped to firm up Grasso’s tastes and perspective in jazz, as did a couple of invaluable recordings his father introduced to him: One Night in Birdland, a live Charlie Parker Quintet compilation featuring Bud Powell and Fats Navarro; and Art Tatum’s Solo Masterpieces box set. Regarding the latter, Grasso remembers, “I couldn’t believe it. I would just play that all day, and I couldn’t understand anything he was doing. It seemed like there were two pianos.” Grass felt a near-identical revelation later, after taking in a concert by the renowned classical guitarist David Russell. “I was shocked by his technique,” he says, “because it sounded like two jazz guitars together. I told my dad, ‘Maybe I should study classical, because I think that would help the way I want to play jazz.’” Grasso began in 2008 to fuse his hard- earned jazz technique with classical revisions and refinements at the Conservatory of Bologna, under the tutelage of guitarist Walter Zanetti.
In 2012, the same year that Pasquale toured extensively as a Jazz Ambassador on behalf of the U.S. Embassy, the guitarist relocated to New York. He hit the scene running, soon enough becoming part of working bands led by Ari Roland and Chris Byars, and settling into a regular gig with the late, great saxophonist Charles Davis. Grasso has also performed with Freddie Redd, Frank Wess, Leroy Williams, Ray Drummond, Steve Grossman, Tardo Hammer, Jimmy Wormworth, John Mosca, Sacha Perry, Bucky Pizzarelli, China Moses, Harry Allen, Grant Stewart and Joe Cohn.
“Grasso is already a nonpareil guitar player armed with a terrifying technique and deep musicality.”
On his initial Sony Masterworks recordings, Pasquale explores standards, ballads, and the repertoire of Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, showcasing his sweeping abilities in the most intimate possible setting. Here you can experience his lifetime of listening and of challenging himself to transcend a bar set by Art Tatum so many decades ago. Coming later in 2021 will be Pasquale Plays Duke, including recordings with his trio and featuring vocalists Samara Joy and Sheila Jordan.