With a move to Blue Note, a simple acoustic-jazz format, the guiding hand of Madeleine Peyroux and Melody Gardot producer Larry Klein, the 27-year-old Nashville singer-pianist Kandace Springs – a buzz on the wires since 2014 as a soul and R&B-inflected artist, who counted Prince among her fans – is taking a career turn. The title track is a classic by the late Mal Waldron – a one-time Billie Holiday pianist – and Springs’s version balances Holiday’s arching long-note turns with sparingly scattered R&B inflections, as Terence Blanchard’s sumptuous trumpet-fills glide around her. The pop-anthemic Place to Hide got the crowd singing on Springs’s recent appearance at the Love Supreme festival, and War’s funky The World Is a Ghetto quickens the album’s mostly languid tempo and sharpens its edge. A generic, dinner-jazzy quality tugs at this music at times, but as Springs’s own delicate jazz-ballad Rain Falling confirms, she has a rare ability that can’t be taught – to sound like an old soul, just doing what comes naturally.
