Soul Cinquian Boptet Jazz singers seem to be a vanishing breed, sadly. No doubt talented young musicians are feeling the tug of more lucrative and high-profile gigs. But I suspect many are also turned off by the skill and dedication jazz singing demands. The beauty of the music is its complexity. If singing were painting, most pop music would be Jackson Pollack while jazz would be pointillism. It’s more demanding on the artist, but the rewards are a more richly detailed picture — a detailed portrait of a specific mood and setting instead of a collection of broad emotional brush strokes. Locally, there are not many opportunities to hear good jazz singing. Joyce Cobb and Teresa Pate would be the best-know exponents of the music, but just as often those artists will dump a good, nuanced standard and resort to crowd-pleasing soul covers. Before she left for New York, Kelly Hurt was the city’s leading chanteuse, as capable of beguiling with her remarkable voice as with her beauty. But she’s been gone a good while now. Fortunately, there is a new young vocalist stepping up to take her place. Candice Ivory, who fronts the Soul Cinquain Boptet, playing every Wednesday from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Hi-Tone Cafe, is only 18 years old. The daughter of a Rhodes professor and a music major at Lemoyne-Owen College, she is already well known in the city’s tight-knit jazz community as host of her own morning radio show on WUMR-FM 91.7. I first saw her sing a little over a year ago in full soul-diva mode with C.Y.C. She has since left that group, but some members of that band and its swingin’ cousin, the New Memphis Hepcats, have popped up in this remarkable group. The Soul Cinquain Boptet was co-founded by the Hepcats’ Eric Mullins, and Jeff Burch (drums), Chip Henderson (guitar), Gerald Stephens (keyboards), and Gokkan Sommel (bass) form the rest of the core unit. These are all young twenty-something college musicians, but they play with a mature swing feel and a playfulness you wouldn’t expect from students. They tackle the familiar repertoire of standards with an automatic timidity, but with a hands-on inventiveness, like precocious children discovering a new toy. The star of this show, however, is Ivory. She has the stylings of all the great songbirds — Sarah, Billie, and especially Ella — down pat. A large part of what makes those ladies great is how their voices work on two levels — both as storytellers and as instruments in their own right. It’s a quality Ivory shares, if in a more primitive state. More often than not, her voice takes on the quality of a breathy saxophone as she wraps her pipes around “Love for Sale” or swoops her voice through the melody of “The Girl From Impanema.” Implicit in any great jazz vocalist is a promise of sex and an acknowledgement of the inevitability of heartbreak, and despite her young age, Ivory has those qualities in spades and coveys them through her voice. The Soul Cinquain Boptet sticks to time-worn classics but Memphians so rarely get to hear music like this, played at this high a caliber, that breaking new ground hardly seems to matter. — Mark Jordan The Memphis Flyer regularly reviews local band on demand. To schedule you group’s Moment of Truth, call Mark Jordan at 575-9441 or e-mail him at jordan@memphisflyer.com.