Sous le ciel de Paris

Honoring the work of Duke Ellington, award-winning pianist and scholar in residence Jas Ogiste performs “Sous le ciel de Paris” with acclaimed international soprano Candice Hoyes.

Hoyes has recorded Duke Ellington music with the late Joe Temperley, one of the last surviving members of Duke Ellington Orchestra.

This program features original arrangements of selections from: The Great Paris Concert album such as “Creole Love Call” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street; the Sacred Concerts “TGTT” and “Come Sunday,” as well as rare gems such as “Brown Penny,” from Ellington’s first Broadway musical, which was boycotted because the leading couple was interracial. We also feature sublime standards such as “Mood Indigo” and “In a Sentimental Mood.”

Together, they have played repertory from Ernest Chausson to Akua Dixon. With the program, they are most inspired by the ebullient creativity and musical innovation that flowed from Harlem to Paris.

Candice Hoyes is an award-winning soprano poised to “shape the artist-cum-activist role” (Tonya Mosley, NPR). Her 2026 album debut, as artist, composer and producer, centers visions of neighborly compassion in the American context. Born to Jamaican parents, she uses the “chill inducing range” (Vogue Magazine) of her timbre to explore sounds in healing justice and the Black feminine divine inspired by Jessye Norman, Minnie Riperton, and Toni Morrison. Hoyes is a member of the world-renowned Harlem Chamber Players, where she is originating the principal role of Regina in Akua Dixon’s opera “Marie Laveau.” She has notably performed rare Duke Ellington compositions, collaborating with original Duke Ellington Orchestra saxophonist Joe Temperley, granddaughter Mercedes Ellington, members of Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and performed them at TED headquarters and international music festivals.

In opera and symphonic repertoire, Hoyes has graced stages including Detroit Symphony, Morgan Library, Opera Orlando, Carnegie Hall, Schomburg Center, Caramoor Music Festival, St. Petersburg Opera, Center for Contemporary Opera, North Carolina Opera, Akron Symphony and Brooklyn Academy of Music and NPR’s This American Life.

Candice’s solo debut album Expecting has earned preview acclaim from BBC’s Gilles Peterson who ranked it a major album to look for in 2026. This season, her main-stage debuts include We Out Here Festival (UK), Jacob’s Pillow, Guggenheim Museum, Logan Center for the Arts at University of Chicago, Boston Atheneum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Africa Center and a composer celebration with The Harlem Chamber Players. Hoyes is featured on Moor Mother’s 2025 album “The Film” and eponymous “Nite Bjuti” dubbed “one of the most exciting and original” albums of 2023 (BBC), available on all platforms.

A 2025 DuBois Fellow and winner of the 2024 WNYC Public Song Project, Hoyes interprets songs through a lens of transformative community and ancestral legacy. She is a 2025-26 Visiting Scholar at University of Chicago, in collaboration with the Black Baroque Project. Hoyes has performed and recorded with Philip Glass, Sullivan Fortner, Jessye Norman, Chaka Khan, Makaya McCraven, Moor Mother, Wynton Marsalis and Lin Manuel-Miranda, among other artists.

Her recent collaborations with visual artists include Amy Sherald, Deborah Willis, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Theaster Gates, Camille Norment and Allison Janae Hamilton. Her recordings and research are noted in Carnegie Hall’s Time of Afrofuturism and Vaughn Booker’s Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (NYU Press, 2020).

Candice Hoyes is a honors graduate of Harvard and Columbia Universities and a mother of two.