Big Night at the Grammys
Congratulations to three members of the Purchase music community on winning four awards at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony.
Samara Joy
Best Jazz Performance
Samara Joy ’21 (Jazz Studies)—who won Best New Artist and Best New Jazz Vocal Album in 2023—came back this year with the Best Jazz Performance for “Tight.”
Joy has not only taken the Jazz world by storm, but she’s also reaching the next generation by amassing 6.5M likes and more than 656k followers on TikTok.
Samara Joy has won all three Grammy awards for which she was nominated.
Silas Brown
Best Classical Compendium + Best Engineered Album, Classical
Assistant Professor of Music Silas Brown ’10 (Studio Production) won two Grammy awards this year, marking the fifth and sixth of his career. As producer with Mark Dover, he won the Best Classical Compendium category with Passion for Bach and Coltrane, featuring Alex Brown, Harlem Quartet, Imani Winds, Edward Perez, Neal Smith, and A.B. Spellman.
As mastering engineer, he won the category Best Engineered Album, Classical for his work on the recording Contemporary American Composers, with engineers David Frost and Charlie Post (Riccardo Muti and Chicago Symphony Orchestra).
Brown’s been nominated for eight Grammy awards.
Owner of Legacy Studios, Brown is a producer, engineer, and mastering engineer specializing in classical and jazz recordings with more than 25 years of production credits.
Nicole Zuraitis
Best Jazz Vocal Album
Nicole Zuraitis, Lecturer of Jazz Studies, Voice, won the category Best Jazz Vocal Album for How Love Begins.
Zuraitis is a singer-songwriter, pianist, arranger, bandleader, and winner of the prestigious 2021 American Traditions Vocal Competition Gold Medal, described as a “supreme talent,” “a first-rate songwriter, powerhouse vocalist and grade-A pianist,” and a “poetess and purely expressive artist like no other” in a review How Love Begins on allaboutjazz.com.
Zuraitis’ arrangement of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” co-written with renowned drummer and bandleader Dan Pugach, was nominated for a 2019 Grammy.
Read about all of the nominees.
