Translate

Sunday, October 23

Soul Has No Color, Jazz Has No Gender


"OK so what are the odds that one of the top five most beautiful women on the planet would also be one of the top five best sax players....boy you really get you some value for money when you go to a Candy Dulfer concert !!!"

That's a comment by one Kevin Fisher, posted 9 months ago at a YouTube recording of a live concert version of the Isley Brothers' For the Love of You done by Candy Dulfer and Angie Stone. 

I'd heard of R&B singer Angie Stone, who was probably singing gospel music before she could walk.


But Dulfer's name was new to me. From her introduction to the set Dulfer's accent sounded from a part of the Bronx I wasn't familiar with. Wikipedia informed me that she isn't from the Bronx. She's Dutch, born in Amsterdam in 1969; her father is Hans Dulfer, a jazz tenor saxophonist:
She began playing the drums at the age of five. As a six-year-old she started to play the soprano saxophone. At the age of seven she switched to alto saxophone. ...  Dulfer played her first solo on stage with her father's band De Perikels ("The Perils"). At the age of eleven, she made her first recordings for the album I Didn't Ask (1981) by De Perikels. 
In 1982, when she was twelve years old, she played as a member of Rosa King's Ladies Horn section at the North Sea Jazz Festival. According to Dulfer, King encouraged her to become a band leader herself. In 1984, at the age of fourteen, Dulfer started her own band, Funky Stuff.  ... Dulfer is mostly a self-taught musician except for some training in a concert band and a few months of music lessons.
However, it's one thing to have been a child prodigy. It's another to take on For the Love of You. No one I'd heard who's tried over the decades has been able to do justice to the original version by the Isleys.

Well! Life is full of surprises.

********

No comments: