Stacey Kent

The Long Way Home by Lee Jeske - July 2000
 
The most delightful jazz singer to emerge in the last five years is coming home. And she's bringing her bandleader, arranger and saxophonist with her. "I guess we've said, 'Well, if we don't like it, we can always go back," says STACEY KENT.

"But we've been toying with the idea more than ever, and it really exhilarates us as opposed to scares us. But it's weird, you can be so big here, you can be huge in Minnesota and nobody's ever heard of you in Chicago, or wherever. It's not like what we're used to in Britain, where if you're known and you've done well, kind of everybody's know you." Kind of everyone jazz fan in England knows Stacey Kent -- she's their hot, young jazz singer. Thing is, she's our hot, young jazz singer, although most American's don't know that yet. Kent is a born and bred New Yorker who went to London just to find a vacation, stuck a feather in her cap, and called it macaroni. Or something like that.

To work backwards, she's just released her third album on London's Candid Records, Let Yourself Go: Celebrating Fred Astaire. It has all the virtues of the first two: perfectly picked standards, delicious, unpretentious singing and gently swinging arrangements that recall the classic Billie Holiday small group sides. Kent has the sound of a natural -- her odd, pinched voice has a girlish intimacy, without being coy (think, oh, Mildred Bailey), and she swings as handily as any jazz singer around. She knows how to deliver a lyric, and she remains firmly a part of her tasty band. The is the kind of jazz singing that grumps like me will claim you can't find anymore.

It's simple. It swings. And most of all, it's not a tiny bit self-conscious. The Stacey Kent story goes something like this: The daughter of New York intellectuals follows the New York intellectual path, goes to Sarah Lawrence and gets a degree in comparative literature. She sings around the house, likes old records, but she ain't a singer. After graduation, she heads to London to hang out with some friends. Friends audition for a post-grad course at the Guildhall School of Music -- what the hell, she'll audition, too. Bingo, she's in the course. Starts hanging out with jazzbos. Marries a saxophonist, and they start playing pubs and clubs together.

Ba da-bing, ba da-boom, the New Yorker is the musical toast of London. "Jim Tomlinson, my husband, is the key to all of this, says Kent. "I met him, and we fell in love in two seconds flat. He had a very similar story to mine in that he was a philosophy student at Oxford, even though he had always played music. He did more music than I did, but when we met, it was so obvious that we had such a good thing going together, musically as well as socially, that we got together and started to play, and we got a lot of gigs. Those were my first gigs ever." The jazzbos she was playing with said, "Let's do a demo."

She did a demo. Sent it around. Legendary British trad trumpeter, Humphrey Lyttelton got one in his role as an influential deejay. "He played me on his very popular show before I had a record deal," Kent recalls. "He just said, 'I don't normally don't play things that aren't finished records but you've got to hear this.' So the whole country got to hear me. I started to get so much work that I think Candid Records got interested, too." And I got interested. A couple of years ago, Close Your Eyes, her debut landed on my stereo.

It also landed on my Top 10 list. Excellent album with an excellent follow-up, The Tender Trap. Now comes the Fred Astaire album, as good as the others. And now the big fish is getting ready to leave the little pond. She's got another Candid album to do and then, bet your last farthing, a big label's going to snatch her away. "I feel incredibly lucky," says Kent. "how I was able to meet Jim, who is the greatest man in the world, and play this music that I feel so passionate about. I didn't open my mouth for four years in college. Nobody knew that this is what I did or wanted to do. It was just a series of events; If I hadn't gone to England to visit those friends, I would have never auditioned for the course. And I tell you, there's no way I'd be doing this now. I'd still be loving music, singing for my family and putting it on every minute of the day. But I certainly wouldn't have been doing it."