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CANDY DULFER

SWEET SENSATIONS

Candy, I said, as we settled in for our chat. It came to my mind as I was listening to your music and meditating on what I felt as I listened, that if Candy Store was a book, I would be reading your autobiography to date. “Yes,” she replied with a smile in her voice. “[But,] it really was not calculated or premeditated.” I can’t tell.

ABYSSJazz gets up close and personal with Dutch-born saxophonist, Candy Dulfer. Dulfer speaks candidly, no pun intended, about the making of Candy Store, her debut recording with Heads Up International, why she plays alto instead of tenor sax, and the possibility of sharing the stage with both Mindi Abair and Pamela Williams.

2007 COVER STORIES
Sep/Oct Issue 2007: George Benson
July/August Issue 2007: Euge Groove
May/June Issue 2007: Norman Brown
March/April Issue 2007: Jeff Golub
January/February Issue 2007: Al Jarreau

Candy Dulfer knew she was going to make a new album and being without a recording company for a minute was a minor detail that would soon be resolved. “I knew we had to keep writing – keep the creativity flowing. Otherwise, if we stopped and I got a new record company and had to make a new album in three months… nooo, I never liked that.” As was anticipated, Candy signed with a new record company “Suddenly, Heads Up came and asked me if I wanted to make a new album. I said, ‘yes, [but] we have been writing with no definite plans and there are a lot of different styles.’ Dave Love said he wanted to hear it. So, I sent it to him by mail.” After listening to the new music, Dave phones Candy saying, “I want this” and Candy responds with, “Are you sure? It’s not formatted and it has a lot of different styles! We will have to say to everybody that it is not this and it is not that. I don’t mind because this is how I grew up. And Dave says, ‘This is how I grew up, too, so let’s go for it.’ And that’s why Candy Store is so broad in it’s musical scope. Like you said, it is all the stuff that’s a part of my life… my autobiography. The album is about my love for music; giving younger audiences a glimpse of the past without being scholarly.”

Dulfer applauds Dave Love’s fearlessness in allowing them to make the music they wanted to make without worrying about where it would be played. “Dave is in the jazz/smooth jazz business and he knows how hard it is. It’s been so difficult in the last few years. On the one hand, you came up with the smooth jazz style [and] it was great, in the beginning. But, at one point, because of commerciality and the big companies behind the radio stations, everything got suffocated. And I have an additional problem. While my music is sometimes chosen to be played on the smooth jazz stations in the states, and that’s great, if I turn around and say in Europe that I play smooth jazz, they hate it because they think it is the same as elevator music.” That’s not true, I quickly interjected. I think the title or label, smooth jazz, is one of convenience and not accuracy, an assessment she and I both could live with. However, Dulfer makes a great point with this statement, “But when you narrow down a kind of music too much, for instance. Smooth jazz came out of Grover Washington Jr., George Benson and David Sanborn. One aspect of their music, not all of it, is that sometimes it was very beautiful and smooth to listen to. People took that part and said, ‘oh, I love that best about that music and we should make an art form out if it.’ The danger of doing that was we didn’t get bop, a specific kind of beat and depth.”

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