Candice Hoyes

Candice Hoyes is a vocalist, composer, archivist and curator of ”chill-inducing range" (Vogue). The prolific singer and songwriter has been dubbed “an artist with the most eclectic and delicious voice ever" by JazzFM (UK) as she brings “Black history into the present” (NPR).

Hoyes and international sensation DJ/Producer Natasha Diggs reign with their starry soul House remix of Zora's Moon - a hypnotic twist on Hoyes’s 2020 ode to Black girlhood, inspired by her hero, writer Zora Neale Hurston. Whereas the original (written with GRAMMY winners Sullivan Fortner and producer Casey Benjamin) was Hoyes’s lucid response to global racial reckoning, Hoyes has released this one-year anniversary Zora's Moon remix as her divine declaration of Black feminine liberation as music lovers at last reunite on block parties and dance floors. The new Remix music video, directed by Hoyes, was shot on location in Brooklyn, the home of Diggs’ global dance party community Soul In The Horn. Coming in hot out the gate, Zora's Moon Natasha Diggs Remix just entered Traxsource Soulful House Charts at #11 (September 13, 2021).

Her forthcoming 2022 album is her deepest departure into song writing to date, steeped in funk and rare archival finds. Each track unfolds like episodes on the journey into womanhood. She glides and grooves the breadth of her sensual five-octave range with a storyteller’s wit. In “Zora’s Moon,” Hoyes samples a raucous 1943 radio conversation with feminist icon Zora Neale Hurston, a view into the trailblazer’s legacy from a contemporary perch. She gracefully sweeps 70’s inspired landscapes, covering deep cut songs by Minnie Riperton and Roberta Flack and even SWV, inspired by the vast artists she inherited as a kid from her parents’ record collection.

Of Jamaican parentage, Hoyes is the first professional musician in her family. She is a graduate of Harvard University, where she studied sociology and Black Studies. Her collaborative recordings include Wynton Marsalis, Ira Glass, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Philip Glass and Lin Manuel-Miranda. Classically trained in voice and piano, Hoyes has performed across every musical genre. Recent performances include 2020 NYC JazzFest, Detroit Symphony, Caramoor Music Festival, Nublu JazzFest, the Public Theater, and the Blue Note. She has written for Shondaland, Blavity and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and spoken and performed at TED HQ.

Hoyes is an activist/producer and Harvard University graduate. She has created, sung and music directed an acclaimed feminist performance lecture series for Jazz at Lincoln Center and CUNY for three recurrent seasons, and is a collaborator of TED, Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote, National Black Theater, The Blacksmiths, Feminist Press, Well Read Black Girl, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Law, Lower Eastside Girls Club, Women in Music, and numerous grassroots organizations.

Hoyes is available in partnership with Collective Speakers.