kandace springs Sung From A Great Place words by:
Adolf Alzuphar
In 1957, Mal Waldron, a jazz musician who most often wore his mustache, beard, and uncut hair to the tune of an elegant suit and tie, first recorded a ballad that he’d written, “Soul Eyes.” The song would go on to be a Jazz classic. “Soul Eyes” is a warming narrative that takes its time at communicating a narrator’s sentiments. Like all great ballads, it romances one’s mood and nerves and affects one’s personality. Soul Eyes is also the name of 27-year-old singer Kandace Springs’s label debut. Springs is an artist on Blue Note Records, a label set on producing music that does not pander to any fashionable nihilism or hedonism. Like her label mates, she composes and interprets phenomenal compositions and not methods of moving a teenaged listener into delusional fury. Soul Eyes is an album of well researched and well-executed singing. Her voice is calm and confident in its delivery. A listener who can listen to the sounds that make up music, the parcels of a song, is Soul Eyes’s ideal listener. Her album mostly features the piano. Kandace’s singing is always adorned in refined instrumentation. It is that same piano that was the ragtime piano, the jazz piano, the stride piano, the blues piano, and the R&B piano that have socialized the American soul and it’s important to keep that in mind when listening to Soul Eyes. We also hear the organ that so much of soul was known for in pleasant doses. 30
