Samantha James

Samantha James performs in the dance-pop vein yet takes her cues not from the expected R&B vocalists but from a quieter strain of 1980s artists shaped by vintage cocktail jazz and bossa nova, among them Basia, Sade, and Tracey Thorn of Everything But the Girl, together with like-minded contemporaries such as Bebel Gilberto and Miho Hatori of Smokey & Miho. Raised in Los Angeles from birth, she is the granddaughter of the late David Rose, the orchestra leader and composer of film and television scores whose best-known work remains the 1962 instrumental hit “The Stripper.” Her first album, Rise, which Sebastian Arocha Morton (aka Rocasound) co-wrote and produced, appeared in 2007 on the San Francisco-based electronica label OM Records after its title track topped the Billboard club chart the previous year.