Every so often a booking arrives that reframes what the Finger Lakes can offer concert-goers outside the summer amphitheater circuit. Samara Joy and her Septet at Smith Center for the Arts in Geneva on Wednesday, October 7 is that kind of booking — a Grammy Award-winning jazz vocalist performing in a 130-year-old theater that has seen everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Stevie Ray Vaughan. Tickets are on sale now at thesmith.org.
Who Is Samara Joy
Samara Joy McLendon arrived in the jazz world through the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, which she won in 2019 before she had even finished her studies at SUNY Purchase’s jazz program. She was 19. The win was a signal; the records that followed confirmed it.
Her second album, Linger Awhile (2022), reached number one on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart and introduced her to audiences well beyond the jazz core. The response from critics focused on the same qualities: a voice of exceptional warmth and control, an interpretive intelligence that goes beyond technical accuracy, and a connection to the tradition — Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Carmen McRae — that never feels like pastiche. Multiple Grammy Awards have followed, including Best New Artist. She has become the rare figure who wins over both the conservatory crowd and general audiences who hadn’t been paying much attention to jazz.
Her Septet is a working band, not a studio arrangement. These are musicians who have spent time on the road together, and it shows in how they play — responsive, attentive, with the kind of trust that makes a performance feel alive rather than executed.
The Venue
The Smith Center for the Arts — housed in the historic Smith Opera House at 82 Seneca Street — is a 1,400-seat theater that opened in 1894 and was restored to its 1931 Art Deco grandeur in a renovation that began in 1994. It is one of the finest rooms in the Finger Lakes for serious concert-going: good sight lines, warm acoustics, and a sense of occasion that you don’t get in a generic performing arts center. For an artist of Samara Joy’s caliber, it’s an appropriate room.
Tickets for the October 7 show are available at Eventbrite and at thesmith.org. This one is worth planning around.