PHILADELPHIA — Samara Joy will celebrate her birthday in Philadelphia.

The jazz singer’s career has been ascendant since 2019, when she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition while a student at Fordham University. Four years later, she stunned the music world when she was named best new artist at the 2023 Grammys.

That experience, Joy says, speaking from her Harlem apartment, left her “truly shocked.”

“I was genuinely shocked just to be there,” says the singer, who will kick off the final leg of her tour for her album "Portrait" with a concert at the Miller Theater on South Broad Street on Tuesday, the day she turns 26.

“I was just so starstruck the whole weekend,” she recalls. ”It was like going behind the golden door and there were all these celebrities there. Not like on my TV at home, but live and in living color.”

But Joy’s response to finding herself in that heady company that night in Los Angeles when the winners in other major categories were Bonnie Raitt, Lizzo, and Harry Styles — and when she also won best jazz vocal album for "Linger Awhile" — is typical of the sensible, music-first approach that has served her well so far in her young career.

“I’m so glad that I just said to myself that I’m going to go start a band, and I’m going to continue to work on my craft. That was just what felt most natural to me. It was what my ear was leaning toward. I was listening to more horns, more orchestration, and I had a desire to have that kind of backing.”

That led to Joy’s latest and most fully realized album, "Portrait," which was made at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, the historic site where Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan, and many other jazz greats recorded in the 1950s and 1960s.

The album is the first that Joy has co-produced. It also marks her increased confidence as a songwriter. Among the lyrics she penned are new words for Charles Mingus’ instrumental tribute to Charlie Parker, “Reincarnation of a Lovebird.” And “Peace of Mind” was written “at a time when I was very unsure of myself” at the start of her career. The song then finds comfort as it flows into a lushly melodic take on Sun Ra’s “Dreams Come True.”

Joy’s staggering vocal command and the smoky timbre and dazzling range of her voice have earned frequent comparisons to classic jazz vocalists like Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as another personal favorite, Carmen McRae.

She’s flattered, but also intent on expressing herself as an individual. Before recording "Portrait," an album that she says she hopes “help people see more clearly who I am,” Joy immersed herself in the orchestral jazz of Duke Ellington and arrangement of the late Philadelphia saxophonist Benny Golson, who died in 2024.

Making the album, she leaned into the arranging talents of her band members who will be with her on Tuesday. Their names — Connor Rohrer, Jason Charos, Kendric McCallister, Donavan Austin, David Mason, Felix Moseholm, and Evan Sherman — are included along with hers on the album cover, which features a painting of the singer by Dominic Avant.

Tuesday’s concert on Broad Street will bring more unadulterated Joy than her previous shows in Philly.

Joy grew up in the Bronx in New York, and led the choir in her local World Changers Church, before having a jazz conversion moment watching a video of Vaughan singing “Lover Man” in 1959.

But Joy has deep family roots in Philadelphia. Her full name is Samara Joy McLendon and her grandparents, Ruth McLendon and Elder Goldwire, started a gospel group in the 1950s called the Savettes, which was originally founded as a financial savings club to encourage churchgoers to take care of their money.

“It was a savings group, but the wives of the church would pray and sing together, and they were like, ‘We sound kind of good, let’s bring our husbands.’ And that’s how it started,” said Joy, who grew up hearing stories about how the group traveled around in a converted bus called the Godmobile.

“My dad was like 2 years old when they were in the studio recording, and various members of the choir would babysit him. And then he’d play bass in church with them.”

Joy’s father Antonio McLendon is a bassist who was born in Philadelphia and toured extensively with gospel singer Andraé Crouch. Growing up, Joy says, “we came to Philly like three times a year to visit my grandparents. Just to go to their house in West Philly and hang out all day.”

Starting in 2022 and continuing the last two holiday seasons, Joy’s Philly tour stops — first at Ardmore Music Hall and then, as she’s grown in popularity, at the Miller in 2023 and the Kimmel Center venue then known as Verizon Hall last year — have been Christmas-themed shows that mix straight up jazz with seasonal chestnuts and songs drawn from her 2023 EP "A Joyful Holiday."

Those shows featured guest appearances from Joy’s father and many cousins, as well as dramatic showstopping cameos from Goldwire, who is now 94. (His wife Ruth McLendon died in 2012.)

Joy will have plenty family at the Miller on Tuesday. “There are people who live in Philly, in Jersey, some in Delaware. There’s going to be a lot of people there.”

But she and her seven bandmates will be the sole performers. The performance is a self-portrait, but one that’s brought to life in collaboration process with the band.

“We’ve played so many shows together, and developed a very strong chemistry,” Joy says. “And the nuance and the details would not have developed if we hadn’t taken the time to grow together.

“My role is to try to blend with them. I’m the lead voice, but there are also moments where I’m a supporting voice, where I can improvise, and I can control the dynamic of the band. They’re listening intently, and I’m listening intently to what they’re doing.

“There are so many liberties we can take now, because it sounds like — and it is — a complete band,” she says. “We didn’t get to go there when the album first came out, and the music has really grown exponentially since then. So I’m excited for Philly to hear it.”

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An Evening with Samara Joy at the Miller Theater, 250 S. Broad St. at 7 p.m. Nov. 11. EnsembleArtsPhilly.org.

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