Candice Hoyes pays homage to Duke Ellington’s “Far Away Star” with a contemporary arrangement by Ted Nash. Ellington originally recorded “Far Away Star with Swedish singer Alice Babs back in 1978. Hoyes’ rendition serves as a tribute to Ellington, freedom, and the Black experience—past, present, and future. Her compelling soprano carries the weight of Black memories and legacies that challenge the myth of a truly free world after the 13th amendment.

The band, characterized by rich and fluid horn arrangements, swings with a somber elegance, reminiscent of a dirge mourning the persistence of anti-Blackness. “Far Away Star” is featured on the tracklist of Hoyes’ forthcoming solo album. The singer, who also performs with the all-women jazz trio Nite Bjuti, recently received a 2025 DuBois Fellowship. Regarding her latest release, she states, “My single ‘Far Away Star’ is a tribute to Ellington, and it is a tribute to free expression and justice that is as eternal as the North Star.” Be sure to watch the visual for “Far Away Star” and stay tuned for more updates from Hoyes.

Singer and composer Candice Hoyes unveils “The Upper Room (For Mary Winnifred)” for Sadaii Espii Proctor’s adrift: the bayou project, an exhibit running until May 8th at Lincoln Center in New York City. Proctor’s commissioned presentation is part of Lincoln Center’s Social Sculpture Project. The Brooklyn sound designer and new media artist used inspiration from a visit to Ion Swamp in Charleston, South Carolina which is the site of a former rice plantation to pay homage to African Americans separated from their families as a result of North American chattel slavery. Many placed ads and letters in Black publications like Freedom’s Journal and The North Star in search of their loved ones. Attendees of the exhibit can interact with three blue haint-proof doors with their phones to access the past and a digital collage of those letters.

Espii discovered that no less than 50 Maroon communities were founded in forests, mountains, and swampy regions of the south including Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Espii captured sound recordings from the Ion Swamp and they are used to tell the area’s story. She configures the bayou as a place of familiar reclamation, ancestral stories, and Black psychic healing. Hoyes penned “In The Upper Room” for her ancestor grandmother Mary Winnifred and she sings it with prayerful intent. The song marks Hoyes’ debut as a Lincoln Center composer. The use of chamber music, heritage, spiritual wisdom, and lyrical voice is an intertwined approach she plans to produce with over the next few years. Hoyes’ is also one-third of the avant-garde jazz trio Nite Bjuti. Espii’s adrift: the bayou project is showing in Hearst Plaza at Lincoln Center until May 8th. It is free to the public. 

Night Bjuti’s eponymous debut album (pronounced Night Beauty)taps into women’s legacies, freedom, magic and love with ritual jazz, blues and the electronic blessings of Sun Ra. The Black woman trio of vocalist Candice Hoyes, bassist Mimi Jones and percussionist Val Jeanty named themselves after a Haitian folk tale about a deceased girl who reclaims her skeleton to recapture her life. Hoyes’prayerful utterances, Jeanty’s remixing of ceremonial rhythms and Jones’ agile bass does sound like avant-garde jazz for the dead at times. They are the first group of its kind and improvisation is at the center of their creative process that excavates ancestral memories with a balance between the linear and the abstract.

The deeper conceptual moments found in “Witchez” and the rumbling rhythm and poetry of “Mood (Liberation Walk)” is akin to Shabazz Palaces’ celestial hip-hop funk. Zora Neale Hurston’s letter to W.E.B. Dubois proposing a cemetery for eminent Black artists and Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series of photographs are referenced on the album that moves more like a single composition instead of individual songs. Hoyes says, “We are expressing the kind of pillaging, the uprooting of women in ways personal, intergenerational, familial, sexual, past and present.” “Stolen Voice” protests the erasure of Black women’s history and reclaims it at the same time with Jeanty’s whirlwind sequences, Jones’ trancey bass grooves and Hoyes’ piercing notes. The layers of intensity are felt in Hoyes’ vocals expressing sorrowful wails commemorating past wrongs but quickly morph into furious condemnation after striking decibel shifts. The trio is living somewhere in the same universe occupied by Ursula Rucker, Robert Glasper, Flying Lotus, Burnt Sugar, The Last Poets and Kendrick Lamar but they have their own unique space. Night Bjuti’s official debut inventively combines protest, healing, love and truth-telling into an enchanting movement of sound. 

Nite Bjuti’s  “Illustrious Negro Dead” is an urgent request to preserve storied Black legacies and is the second single from their debut album. The trio was inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s 1945 letter written to preeminent Black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois suggesting he create a cemetery to honor all Negro celebrities. Candice Hoyes fervently recites bits of Hurston’s proposal as Val Jeanty and Mimi Jones’s percussion and bass create a spooky nighttime kind of vibe. Hoyes is concerned about Black artists not dying in “conspicuous forgetfulness.” She elaborates, “Although we improvised these words in the studio on Sept 21, they resound this week. Art is meant to break the cycles of oppression and offer new ways of being.” 

Nite Bjuti’s plea happening at the time of the year when Black music fans and critics share opinions on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominations recognizing prominent Black artists. This is also a period where the Hip Hop Alliance is working to raise its profile to further the mission of having all hip-hop and R&B artists fairly compensated with benefits. Hurston’s issue almost eight decades ago is still relevant when superstars like Beyoncé are used to bring ratings to Grammy Award Shows but can’t take home Album of the Year after four nominations. Or when Michael Jackson’s game-changing Thriller album 40th Anniversary Tribute gets canceled at the American Music Awards. “Illustrious Negro Dead” is an observation that all Black creatives of note are still not being fully acknowledged for their work. Nite Bjuti’s newest release is a prayer to remember, honor and sustain the legacies of those artists both living and dead. The group’s full-length album comes out on April 14th.