Samara Joy
Samara Joy | Credit: AB+DM

As Samara Joy strolled onstage, she took a quick breath and quipped, “It’s been a busy week.” Yes, indeed. Fresh off of picking up two more Grammy Awards in Los Angeles — that makes five if you’re keeping score, including her historic Best New Artist win in 2023 — the 25-year-old jazz vocalist said that Wednesday’s Cal Performances concert at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall was her first gig in a month. (She would hit up Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. on Feb. 7, just two night later.)

She quickly dispelled any worries about her chops, launching into a long a cappella introduction to Charles Mingus’s “Reincarnation of a Lovebird” that was so magisterial it would have served most artists as a stunning encore.

Grammys aside, Joy has, in a few short years, earned a bushel of superlatives, and Wednesday’s concert confirmed again that she’s a generational talent. Her voice is a glorious instrument that maintains a velvet-plush tone in every register, and she’s become an expert at writing lyrics for instrumental jazz tunes. What’s scary is that there still seems to be plenty of room for Joy to grow.

She wears her influences on her sleeve, bedazzling her set list with homages to her primary vocal role models, particularly Sarah Vaughan (a sumptuous version of “You Stepped Out of a Dream”), Carmen McRae (an unfocused arrangement of “The Little Things That Mean So Much”), and Betty Carter (a slippery rendition of “Beware My Heart”). Judging by her athletic interpretations of these pieces, Joy isn’t particularly interested in reinterpreting the American Songbook or pop songs of more recent vintage.

Her book brims with straight-ahead jazz, and she’s at her most breathtaking on her loving tribute to a formative mentor, Barry Harris, with her lyrical setting for his tune “Now and Then.” She can just as easily transform a composition into a tour de force with her original lyrics, as she did with Billy Strayhorn’s “U.M.M.G.”

Like on her third and latest album, Portrait, Joy performed at Cal with a young septet. With the four horn players seated in a shallow arc behind her, the band played with the quiet dynamics of a chamber ensemble. The arrangements were all tasteful and well tailored but didn’t provide Joy with much fuel.

Samara Joy
Samara Joy | Credit: Ambe J Williams

She either sings with the band behind her or joins the horn section with wordless lines on ensemble passages during a solo. What never happened was a vocal-horn dialogue or Joy interacting individually with any of her bandmates aside from pianist Connor Rohrer. The presentation is polished but far too polite. Just because she’s playing concert halls and theaters doesn’t mean Joy can’t cut loose a little bit. Perfection is overrated.