There are evenings when jazz feels less like a concert than a conversation across generations. Under the open sky of Central Park, with New York breathing around the SummerStage and the city lights beginning to shimmer beyond the trees, music became a meeting place for women whose voices have shaped the language of jazz, and for a new generation of artists carrying that language somewhere beautifully unexpected.
After a day that had threatened repeatedly to surrender to rain, the clouds finally withdrew. The air remained touched by the freshness of the weather, but the stage was dry, the audience gathered, and the night belonged to music.
At the center of the evening stood Samara Joy, one of the most compelling young voices to emerge into jazz’s contemporary mainstream. Her presence carried a particularly meaningful resonance: she is an artist of the Verve generation, while the spirit of Ella Fitzgerald—the label’s defining vocal legend through its formative decades—has long occupied an important place in her musical imagination.
But this was not an evening of imitation. Samara Joy approached the great women who came before her not as monuments to be reproduced, but as voices with whom she could enter into dialogue.
That distinction was essential. Her Fitzgerald was not an exercise in museum-like preservation. It was alive, supple and rhythmically alert. In “You’d Be So Easy to Love,” Joy seemed to float above Christian McBride’s propulsive bass while simultaneously remaining completely inside the groove. The melody became elastic beneath her voice. A phrase could be stretched, turned, delicately ornamented and then released back into the rhythm with remarkable naturalness.
There was something distinctly feminine in the elegance of her phrasing—not femininity as fragility, but as flexibility, sensual intelligence and control. Joy can make a difficult melodic passage sound as though it has simply appeared in the air.
Ella’s influence was unmistakable, yet Joy’s voice remained unmistakably her own․ The evening’s musical portrait broadened beyond Fitzgerald, embracing other women whose artistic identities had left their own fingerprints on the history of Verve and on Joy’s developing imagination.
Abbey Lincoln occupied one of those spaces. Joy has spoken of Lincoln as a profound inspiration, and her choice was revealing precisely because the two singers inhabit such different artistic worlds. Lincoln’s voice, particularly in the later chapters of her career, could be austere and spacious, allowing silence to become part of the music. Her art could also carry an unmistakably political consciousness, most powerfully heard in her work with Max Roach and the landmark We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.
Joy comes from another moment and another musical vocabulary. Her singing is often extraordinarily elaborate, full of agility, ornament and technical command. Yet when she turned toward Lincoln’s repertoire, the distance between them became part of the fascination.
Her interpretation of “Up Jumped Spring,” Freddie Hubbard’s composition for which Lincoln created lyrics, offered a fascinating transformation. Rather than approaching the piece with Lincoln’s restraint, Joy opened it outward, decorating the melody with her characteristic richness. Notes seemed to curl around one another like ribbons in the breeze. The song became less a quotation from Lincoln than a conversation with her.
It was an affectionate act of musical remembrance—and, equally importantly, an act of independence. Carmen McRae brought another shade to the evening. Where Joy’s instrument can sparkle with virtuosic abundance, McRae’s artistry was often built upon understatement: the perfectly placed syllable, the knowing hesitation, the emotional weight concealed inside a simple phrase. Yet it was precisely in McRae’s blues material that another side of Joy emerged.
The voice relaxed. The brilliance remained, but it no longer needed to announce itself. The phrasing became warmer, more conversational, more vulnerable. Suddenly the listener could hear the young singer not simply as an astonishing technician but as a woman telling a story through the blues.
That moment carried particular emotional weight because it revealed something beneath Joy’s extraordinary command: feeling does not always require vocal fireworks. Sometimes it lives in the space between two notes.
And somewhere in that space, another giant presence could be felt—Sarah Vaughan. Although Vaughan was not directly part of the Verve story in the same way as Fitzgerald, her influence is deeply embedded in the lineage of singers who followed her. Joy’s instrument possesses something of Vaughan’s extraordinary verticality, the ability to move from the depths of the lower register toward luminous, sustained upper notes without losing the center of the musical line.
At moments, Joy’s voice seemed to travel through several registers in a single breath, swooping upward from a dark contralto color into a brilliant soprano light. It was not merely vocal range. It was the sensation of a voice opening. Before Joy even stepped fully into the evening’s narrative, however, the concert had already found its most intimate emotional language. Christian McBride, bassist and bandleader, came onto the stage alone.
He spoke of Cassandra Wilson, whose death had occurred earlier that day, and the atmosphere changed immediately. The immense Central Park setting seemed, for a moment, to become remarkably small. McBride responded not with an elaborate speech but with music.
His solo bass tribute unfolded as a deeply felt blues, apparently spontaneous and profoundly personal. His playing carried the weight of the American South, of earth and memory, of a blues tradition whose emotional truth cannot be separated from place. His words about Wilson’s Mississippi roots gave the music an additional dimension: this was not simply a tribute to a celebrated singer, but an acknowledgment of a musical landscape from which so much of jazz’s emotional vocabulary has grown.
The bass spoke quietly. And the audience listened. Then Marc Cary at the piano and Carl Allen at the drums joined McBride, transforming the intimate memorial into a trio conversation. The musicians moved through the repertoire with precision but without stiffness, balancing architecture and spontaneity. Their playing demonstrated one of jazz’s most beautiful paradoxes: the more deeply musicians understand one another, the freer they can become.
When Samara Joy joined them, the evening expanded once more. The trio’s repertoire reached toward two pianistic giants associated with Verve, Bud Powell and Oscar Peterson. “Shaw ‘Nuff” and “Night Train” brought different energies into the performance—the first carrying the brilliant, compressed language of bebop, the second drawing upon the muscular swing and blues-centered vocabulary associated with Peterson.
Here the musicians were not simply revisiting famous recordings. They were reopening doors. Every generation of jazz musicians must decide what to do with the music it inherits. Preserve it? Transform it? Challenge it? Joy and McBride chose the most fruitful possibility: they allowed history to breathe.
Another emotional current entered the concert through Nick Getz, whose presence connected the stage directly with one of Verve’s most celebrated recordings. Introducing the tribute to Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s Getz/Gilberto, he spoke about his parents and about his mother’s determination to persuade Verve to believe in the Brazilian-American musical partnership at a moment when the industry considered bossa nova’s commercial moment to be fading.
History, of course, had a different idea. Getz/Gilberto became an international phenomenon, turning its delicate combination of Brazilian rhythm, understated vocals and American jazz improvisation into one of the defining sounds of the 1960s. Its success eventually brought the album a Grammy for Album of the Year, confirming that subtle music could possess enormous popular power.
For Nick Getz, however, this was not simply a chapter in recording history. It was family history. His emotion as he spoke made the story feel immediate. Behind the legendary album were people who believed in the music when others did not. And then came Mei Semones.
The Brooklyn-based indie artist might initially appear to belong to another musical universe, but the choice proved inspired. Semones possesses a natural affinity for the gentle rhythmic sway of bossa nova, and her guitar playing revealed just how deeply she understands the form’s delicacy.
Her voice, small and intimate, almost without vibrato, created an intriguing parallel with Astrud Gilberto. Rather than attempting to overpower the melodies, she allowed them to remain light.
That restraint was its own form of sophistication. Her guitar playing provided another dimension. Solos unfolded with fluidity rather than aggression, respecting the floating character of the music while quietly introducing her own personality. There was something almost moonlit about the sound: soft edges, precise gestures, rhythm felt more than declared.
The ensemble surrounding her added another subtle layer. Violin and viola brought a floating, chamber-like texture to the arrangements, surrounding the songs with delicate strands of sound. With no saxophonist attempting to recreate Stan Getz’s celebrated solos, the musical architecture remained open. Semones herself became one of the principal solo voices, joined by violist Noah Leong, whose playing added an unusual color to the familiar repertoire.
The result was not a reproduction of Getz/Gilberto. It was a reflection of it. Several of the album’s celebrated pieces appeared in the performance, but Semones and her musical companions also introduced original compositions. Remarkably, these new songs did not feel like interruptions. They belonged naturally within the atmosphere that had been created, as though the bossa nova language had simply traveled forward through time and found a new accent in Brooklyn.
That was perhaps the evening’s deepest idea. Jazz does not survive because it remains unchanged. It survives because someone hears the past and discovers something in it that still speaks to the present.
Ella Fitzgerald became Samara Joy’s point of departure. Abbey Lincoln revealed another possible relationship between voice, identity and artistic conviction. Carmen McRae opened a door toward the blues. Sarah Vaughan hovered like an invisible vocal constellation. Cassandra Wilson was remembered through the solitary resonance of Christian McBride’s bass. Stan Getz, João Gilberto and Astrud Gilberto returned through the fragile architecture of bossa nova. And Mei Semones demonstrated that music born from a cross-cultural encounter decades ago can still sound fresh when touched by a new generation.
Throughout the evening, the women at the center of the story were never reduced to historical names. They became living musical presences. The concert belonged to memory, but it did not live in the past. It belonged to women whose voices changed jazz—and to women now finding their own ways through the same vast, beautiful language.
Above SummerStage, the night continued to deepen. New York shimmered beyond the trees, the rhythms settled into the darkness, and the final notes seemed to remain suspended for a moment before disappearing. That is what the finest jazz can do. It remembers without becoming nostalgic. It honors without becoming obedient. And it gives the next voice enough space to become herself.
By Daniella Bushler
