Special Caramoor Performance With Candice Hoyes And Damien Sneed

KATONAH, NY — There may be no better way to escape the heat this summer than to drift sublimely away "On a Turquoise Cloud"at the Caramoor's Spanish Courtyard stage.

Vocalist Candice Hoyes and composer, conductor and pianist Damien Sneed will be performing the legendary works of jazz icon Duke Ellington at the upcoming Summer Jazz Festival at Caramoor on July 30. The duo will present Ellington's "On A Turquoise Cloud," a collection of works that are still on the cutting edge of innovation decades after their inception.

The performance will be in collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center. The day's music will begin at 1 p.m. on multiple stages, with Hoyes and Sneed expected to take the Spanish Courtyard stage in mid-afternoon.

The genre-bending compositions of "On A Turquoise Cloud" were rarely performed for nearly 70 years, until Hoyes reimagined the collection on her acclaimed 2015 E.P. of the same title. Sneed will now be joining her for the special live performance. The duo began collaborating when Hoyes sang for the first national tour of Wynton Marsalis' "The Abyssinian Mass," which Sneed conducted.

The Caramoor audience will experience a performance and conversation exploring Duke Ellington as a global artist who generated a broader cultural movement across borders, and the enduring value of the Harlem Renaissance in the digital age.

"We are both inspired to highlight the 75th anniversary of these works," Hoyes explained. "To me, On a Turquoise Cloud paved the way in style and substance for today’s musical theater, soul and contemporary classical music."

Hoyes returns to Caramoor after singing the lead soprano role "The Girl" in the acclaimed broadcast of Shirley Graham DuBois’ opera, Tom-Tom in 2020 (Graham DuBois was the first Black female opera composer, a pioneering human rights activist and wife of W.E.B. DuBois).

As a student, Hoyes was a young artist at Bel Canto at Caramoor for two seasons (2009-2010). She says she is inspired by her upcoming appearance at Caramoor this season, where she will continue to honor Black jazz legends while engaging audiences with her contemporary sound.

More information on Caramoor and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s collaborative Jazz Festival can be found here.

Candice Hoyes

Candice Hoyes is an artist with a “chill-inducing range” (Vogue). Candice’s 2021 EP Blue Lagoon Woman is regaled in Carnegie Hall’s Timeline of African American Music (2022): “More recently, artists such as Flying Lotus, Future, RZA, Thundercat, Moor Mother, and others, including singer and songwriter Candice Hoyes, have made [Afrofuturist] contributions. A graduate of Harvard who earned a JD degree from Columbia University, Hoyes is an artist-intellectual whose 2021 EP Blue Lagoon Woman exemplifies several Afrofuturist characteristics….Her scholarship on such luminaries of African American cultural history represents a noticeable departure from the usual practice of isolating creativity and critical analysis, and the textures of her sound exemplify Afrofuturism as well.”

Born to Jamaican parents, Candice is a performance artist and archivist mutually steeped in exploring the untold stories of her heritage and envisioning the next leg of Black liberation. She gravitated towards Black feminist musicians and writers at an early age and began composing after starting an acclaimed career as a classical Soprano soloist who has recorded and collaborated with Philip Glass, Ricky Ian Gordon, Wynton Marsalis and the late Lorin Maazel, her prizes including the International Liszt Vocal Competition, Oratorio Society of NY, and Paul Robeson Vocal Competition.

Candice’s recent works include Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 2022 NYC JazzFest, Detroit Symphony, the Blue Note and supporting Chaka Khan, Lalah Hathaway and Lin-Manuel Miranda. As an activist, she was commissioned in 2020 by Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote and National Black Theater to compose music to mobilize Black voters. Candice is a mother of two, a TED alumna and serial lecturer at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and she anticipates two new album releases next year. In multiple aspects, Candice brings “Black history into the present” (NPR).