Kandace Springs - LYDIALIEBMAN.COM

Lady in Satin
Release date: May 9, 2025
Label: SRP Records

Lady in Satin is the fifth album by Kandace Springs, an esteemed jazz vocalist hailing from Music City: Nashville, Tennessee. A luminous tribute to Billie Holiday, the 12-song collection is reverent, luxurious, tasteful reimagining of Lady Day’s classic 1958 album of the same name. Therein, the singer is backed by the 60-piece Portuguese ensemble Orquestra Clássica de Espinho, who serve as ideal accompanists with whom to channel a titanic figure — not just in vocal jazz, but Black American music itself.

The cover is a nod to the 65-year-old original’s: where Holiday turned left, Springs faced the lens, revealing Lady Day’s trademark white gardenia in her hair. But Lady in Satin is no impression of Holiday: quite the opposite is true. “Billie Holiday is one of my biggest influences, she’s in my DNA,” Springs states. “But I didn’t want to imitate her, that would be disrespectful.” She circumvented this by absorbing instrumental versions of these beloved standards: “That way, I could come up with my own way to interpret them.”

Holiday’s final album released during her lifetime — 1959’s posthumous Last Recording concluded her studio discography — the gorgeously weatherbeaten Lady in Satin is widely acknowledged as Holiday’s final masterpiece.

AllMusic called the original album “high art performances from the singer who saw life from the bottom up,” and in 2020, Rolling Stone ranked it No. 317 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. As jazz singers go, Holiday arguably represents the zenith of the mountain. And Springs comes to Lady in Satin as a worthy scaler of that mountain — one acclaimed in her own right. (After all: her mentor, the one and only Prince, once remarked she has “a voice that could melt snow.”)

Critics have wholeheartedly agreed. “She has a rare ability that can’t be taught — to sound like an old soul, just doing what comes naturally,” The Guardian observed of Springs’ 2016 debut album, Soul Eyes, produced by legendary bassist Larry Klein and released on Blue Note Records. On that venerable label, she released 2018’s hip-hop- and soul-inflected Indigo, and 2020’s hat tip to her key jazz vocal influences, The Women Who Raised Me.

The pandemic made Kandace pause and reflect, and the result was her most personal album yet, Run Your Race, released in 2024 on SRP Records. Paris Move called Run Your Race, a tribute to Springs’ late father, “a major work, showcasing Kandace’s ability to reinvent herself without missteps,which is the mark of great artists.” All this led, inexorably, to Lady in Satin.

“I’d always wanted to do a record to pay tribute to Billie Holiday,” Springs recalls.”And I’d always wanted to work with an orchestra. Finally I realized that this was the way to do both.” A friend connected her with the Orquestra, who surprisingly had been looking to do just such a project. “From the minute we first talked, I knew that we were going to make a great album together.”

From concept to concert, Lady in Satin took nearly a year to gel. As the first priority was timeless, sumptuous orchestrations, Springs and the Orquesta brought on masterful arrangers: Nuno Peixoto de Pinho, Carlos Azevedo, Daniel Bernardes, William Goodchild, Pedro Moreira, Telmo Marques. “The moment I first sang with the orchestra, I couldn’t believe how beautiful it sounded,” says Springs, who’d never worked with an orchestra previously. “Listening now, I still can’t believe it. And I can’t wait for people to hear it.”

This personalized sequence of Lady in Satin kicks off with Carl Fischer and Bill Carey’s “You’ve Changed” — also the first track Springs and the Orquestra recorded. “I was pretty nervous the day I arrived,” she admits. “I had no idea what it would sound like.” As soon as the Orquestra launched into the ballad, though, “It sounded incredible, so beautiful — like the dreams I’d been having about it came to life. I was in heaven.”

Following this is a simmering version of Don Raye, Gene De Paul, and Tobias T. Gebb’s “You Don’t Know What Love Is” — originally written for the 1941 Abbott and Costello film Keep ‘Em Flying. “I’ve been listening to “For All We Know” since high school,” Springs says of the J. Fred Coots and Samuel M. Lewis mainstay. “To be honest, I mostly knew the Donny Hathaway version. But Billie does the full verse at the beginning of the song, and I’d never even heard that before. It put a whole new meaning to the song, made it even deeper.”

Springs then puts her own spin on Joel S. Harron, Frank Sinatra, and Jack Wolf’s “I’m a Fool to Want You,”; Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke’s “But Beautiful,” from the 1947 Bing Crosby cinematic vehicle Road to Rio; and Alec Wilder’s “I’ll Be Around,” made a hit in 1943 by the Mills Brothers.

“Learning these songs makes me feel like I have a lot of new friends!” Springs says with a laugh. “I had never even heard [Elise Bretton, Sherman Edwards and Don Meyer’s] ‘For Heaven’s Sake’ before, and now it’s one of my favorite songs.” Edward Redding and Eileen Tracye Smith’s “The End of a Love Affair” continues this poignant journey through the affairs of the heart, followed by Rodgers and Hart’s “It’s Easy To Remember,” written for another Bing Crosby flick — this one 1935’s Mississippi.

Despite being hits in their day, Matt Dennis and Tom Adair’s “Violets For Your Furs” — written and first recorded by Frank Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra — and Hoagy Carmichaels “I Get Along Without You Very Well” have gotten somewhat left behind, as standards go: Lady in Satin marked an opportunity for Springs to illuminate both.

The album concludes masterfully with Rodgers and Hart’s mainstay “Glad to Be Unhappy.” Here and throughout the album, the ensemble makes full use of timbres usually reserved for traditional classical music — French horns, bassoons, harp, tympani — to create lush valleys and soaring peaks beyond what a typical big band or string section can achieve.

“I’ve done some great concerts with big bands, but to be in the middle of this amazing sound was something I’d never experienced,” Springs says. From Holiday’s heart, through Springs’ lips: now that sound is yours.