“Go, Tell It on the Mountain” Thanksgiving is in the past and the future is looking merry and bright in State College. Samara Joy brought the holiday spirit to Penn State’s Eisenhower Auditorium on Tuesday night for a stop on her “A Joyful Holiday” tour.
“If you would’ve told me, that as a beginner in 2017, this is where I would be right now in 2024, I would’ve said you were lying,” Joy said. “It’s been a beautiful journey thus far.”
Among the 729 people in attendance, Lisa Garred, 58, from DuBois, Pennsylvania, was seeing Joy for her second time. She first saw Joy in Harlem, New York, with her son. On Tuesday night, Garred was joined by Darren Klaum, 59, and six friends, who aren’t jazz fans.
“That will not matter,” Garred said in response to her non-jazz-loving friends. “You will walk away being blown out of the water. She is amazing.”
Klaum also admitted to not being a jazz fan but said he attended to hear Joy’s music. He said among their holiday travels, Garred and himself made time to see Joy’s “A Joyful Holiday” tour.
“This was definitely an above and beyond trip for us,” Klaum said.
Before Joy and her ensemble took the stage, the backdrop circled through Joy’s childhood and family pictures.
Sienna Pinney
“The whole family thing is the best part about the show, after Samara,” Garred said.
Joy was joined on the stage by the McLendon Family, including her dad, her cousins and uncle, three instrumentalists and an 11-person chorus. With music arrangements done by her dad, Antonio McLendon, every song performed was a unique take on each classic hit.
Throughout the 90-minute show, the three-time Grammy Award winner, who was also nominated twice more in 2024, sang original songs mixed in with holiday classics like “Christmas Time Is Here,” “This Christmas,” “O Holy Night” and “The Christmas Song.”
Images of winter landscapes, falling snow, shimmering ornaments and slow-flickering lights danced behind them on stage, setting the holiday scene.
Each person on stage had their moment to shine like they would in a casual jazz band. The bassist, pianist and drummer all had solos that ended in applause from the audience, and throughout the songs, each of Joy’s family members had their moment.
Vidda Jimenez, a graduate student studying business analytics, spent the evening with Ivys Terrero, a third-year studying cybersecurity analytics and operations, who has been a fan of Joy for about a year and a half.
Sienna Pinney
“She put me on, and I just like jazz,” Jimenez said. “I wanted to be more cultured.”
Joy shared the culture of jazz as Jimenez had hoped by executing technical skills such as singing a cappella, a Brazilian jazz song in Portuguese and casual octave-scaling runs. Her family pitched in for harmonies, crescendos, decrescendos, stage presence and even some audience engagement during “Joy to the World.”
“The opportunity to now share this with my family just reminds me even more that I’m doing the right thing, in the right place, in the right time,” Joy said.
