Jazz Musician Kandace Springs

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.

Her songs are much less brutal on the soul than what we are used to in the US today and it’s immediately apparent. Her own “Soul Eyes” is sung with towering composure. “Place To Hide” is a slow atmospheric song where we hear a beautiful multitude of instrumentation but most of all the piano. She sings us “let me be your place to hide” without gimmick. “Thought It Would Be Easier” is also slow and is an undeniable gem. There is a wonderful organ featured in the song. She sings us that “I can’t / stand it” as if to speak up for legions of women. “Fall Guy” is an incredible listen that speaks to one’s maturity and to cultured temperament. “Rain Falling” is this album’s highlight.

“Novocaine Heart” is an original composition. “People wear sunglasses, in the dark” and that she’s “not taking novocaine / for my heart” to a great piano playing, and the occasional organ make this a cerebral listen that is worth one’s time.

Kandace’s was born in Nashville, TN. She is still based in Nashville. Nashville was founded in 1779, in honor of Francis Nash, a hero during the American Revolutionary War. Today it is famous for its country music industry. What most outsiders have no idea about is the American living that developed in Nashville, without a strong colonial past such as New Orleans, Louisiana, or Mobile, Alabama, and so open to improvisational living. Perhaps that’s the answer to what a Jazz musician is doing in a city known for country music.

It is there that her heart and mind were first cultured, or where she received a sentimental education. In speaking to her, I was let into the formative experiences that shaped her personality and music. I asked about how the city shaped her and sort of brushed it aside to get to the truth about her personal experience. The image that comes most to mind when thinking about the sentimental education of a female singer who is of African descent is a mother brushing her hair both elegantly and precisely as if to set the tone that her child will live by. She even told Allure magazine that “When I was younger, my mom had no idea how to work with my thick, coarse curls so she would try to brush them out every morning. It only made them dull and frizzy. One time, my hair was so knotted that the handle of the brush actually snapped off. That’s when I started figuring out what you should and shouldn’t do with curls—like brush them.” It as if to tell this child, as she brushes her hair, that it’s important to live this life as a certain woman or else you will pay the consequences. It is how girls of African descent learn to be alone with heritage and tradition and to be the color of their skin, the texture of their hair, the elegance in their movements, that they will soon sit, stand, parade, and graduate. It is where they learn to feel and to perform life. Her formative experiences had to do with her father. I did not ask about her mother.

Her father, Scat Springs, is a musician. Growing up, he got his daughter lessons with the Wooten brothers, including Victor Wooten, the great bass player. The Wooten brothers lived in Nashville. One day, growing up, an old lady had fallen into hard times and her piano was going to get thrown out. Her father decided to buy the piano and to bring it home. Her first instinct was to play “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano. Her father’s was not. He played his daughter vernacular American music, the music of soul and spirit. She told me all of this in laughter youth and with heart.

This is an album of classical, traditional, American music, a commercial genre that doesn’t exist but should. In other words, its songs are traditional ways of expressing one’s self in the US. Any tradition transmits something of symbolic value to future generations. In this case, we hear the all important piano but also the guiding vocals that have traversed American society and suggested. The very first recording of “Soul Eyes” also included balladeer and saxophone extraordinaire John Coltrane. He would have been glad to hear this album were he still alive and to know that faith in a ballad he loved has led to a wonderful album, Soul Eyes.

Listen to Kandace Springs’ debut album, SOUL EYES, on iTunes.