Jazz Hits Runway at New York Fashion Week

By Angelika Beener I Dec. 19, 2016

Candice Hoyes (left) at New York Fasion Week
(Photo: Kelly Rose)

The fashion capital of the world concluded its most coveted event of the year on Sept. 17. As New York Fashion Week descended upon Gotham City, it brought the industry’s most cutting-edge designers and latest trends to the swankiest venues in the city.

With its exclusive audiences of sharp-eyed buyers, pop culture superstars and fashion forward upper-crusters it is not exactly the scene you’d envision for a jazz musician, and ironically so. From Billie Holiday’s gardenia to Monk’s goatee and glasses and Miles’ progressive panache, jazz and fashion have, historically, been inextricably tied.

It is a connection that newcomer designer Charles Harbison palpably embraces. A lover of jazz vocalists, Harbison, who took the fashion industry by storm in 2013 with the launch of his eponymous luxury clothing brand (with style luminaries First Lady Michelle Obama and Beyoncé already on his clientele list), has found his latest muse in emerging jazz and opera singer Candice Hoyes.

Hoyes’ “Heaven,” from her debut album, On A Turquoise Cloud, closed his highly anticipated runway show at The Standard Hotel in the fashion-elite Meatpacking District this past Tuesday. Meanwhile, the artist herself was in the audience with a stunning black dress from Harbison that cascaded off her petite silhouette.

The artistic idioms—jazz and fashion—seemed to take cues from one another, the music flowing about the room with a distinct grace and elegance. Hoyes’ muse was obvious: the quintessentially fashionable Duke Ellington.

Ellington’s affinity for the female soprano voice dates back to the 1920s with Adelaide Hall, who was a pivotal figure of the Harlem Renaissance and a pioneer of scat.

The 1927 recording “Creole Love Call” highlights her longtime association with the Ellington Orchestra. Ellington utilizes Hall’s operatic, wordless vocal to texture, layer and color his composition. It’s an element he would seek throughout his career, working with classically trained coloratura soprano Kay Davis the 1940s.

Ellington’s “Transblucency” and “On A Turquoise Cloud” were written expressly with Davis in mind. Similarly, he wrote the song “Heaven” for Swedish singer Alice Babs, whose three-octave range often inspired him.

The rarer repertoire from Ellington —some of his most poignant, if perhaps overlooked— fit Hoyes like a pair of opera gloves. All featured on On A Turquoise Cloud, Hoyes found deep inspiration in these pieces and in the women who refused to be pigeonholed.

“I think when Ellington was composing, it felt more popular and authentic for artists of color to draw from various backgrounds, classical, jazz, blues and gospel traditions. And the limitations were outwardly imposed, by racism and classism,” says Hoyes. “‘These people don’t belong on an opera stage, and can’t use their voice that way.’ So these songs are radical songs artistically, and I’m radical in my way.”

The Harvard-educated vocalist, who also earned a law degree from Columbia University and a master’s degree in voice pedagogy from Westminster Choir College, relied on her extensive training and the shoulders of these intrepid women to conceptualize a concert of this personal material. But while touring with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in 2013 as part of the Abyssinian Baptist Church bicentennial celebration, she was encouraged to take the idea further.

JLCO drummer and two-time GRAMMY winner Ulysses Owens Jr. suggested Hoyes develop the concept for an album, offering to produce the project and handpicking an octet which included Ted Nash, Ron Blake, Marcus Printup, Vincent Gardner and Wycliffe Gordon among others.

“The album required excavating these rare songs, that have little history on how to perform them and creating a cohesive sound, when the music spans five decades,” says Hoyes, who spent almost a year researching the music at the Smithsonian Institute’s Ellington Archive. “In some ways, there was no musical playbook, and we enjoyed that process.”

A particular highlight comes from JLCO elder statesman and former Ellington band member, Joe Temperley, who performs a moving bass clarinet intro on the alluring “Single Petal Of A Rose.” The addition of lyrics, which Hoyes penned to her young daughter, strike gold.

For the South Florida raised, Jamaican-American Hoyes, On A Turquoise Cloud is something of a full circle experience. As a child listening to her grandfather’s extensive jazz collection and learning the Great American Songbook, her love for both jazz and classical music was only eclipsed by the possibilities of their fusing. Uncovering the brilliance and importance of the soprano Ellingtonian voices of Adelaide Hall, Kay Davis, and Alice Babs and Ellington’s fearless ingenuity brought about perhaps Hoyes’ most instrumental revelation as a breakout singer. “As vocalists, I think that we are often faithful to musical categories that other people prescribe to us when we don’t have to be.” DB