LINER NOTES by HUMPHREY LYTTELTON
It was one day in 1996 when a demo cassette turned up in my BBC post-bag, one of many that I receive in my capacity of jazz radio presenter. The singer's name, Stacey Kent, was new to me, and the cassette sat on my desk for weeks taunting my conscience until, faced with a long journey to some far-flung gig, I gathered it up with a variety of other tapes and transferred it to my car. On the road, it happened to be the first tape I picked up from the heap on the passenger seat -- and the last. The singing held me riveted for the rest of the outgoing journey and throughout the return trip the next day, and I included a track in my radio programme at the first opportunity. Now the invitation to write a note for this debut CD calls upon me to analyse the causes of this rush on enthusiasm to the head.
Let's start with the "feel". The great cornettist Ruby Braff has said that one of the most important requirements in jazz performance is "adoration of the song" -- and few musicians caress a standard tune with more palpable adoration than he. Stacey Kent grew up in New York, listening to the music of Frank Sinatra, Nat "King" Cole and the jazz masters of the Swing Era. Before she ever thought of adopting a singing career, she had come to love the repertoire of American popular song, much of which had been established decades before she was born. And it shows in every note she sings.
The next stage in my analysis leads me to "style", that elusive quality which identifies an artist's handling of the subject matter. Many popular songs through the ages have survived as "standards" largely through the attention of jazz or jazz-influenced performers. The way in which Louis Armstrong in the Thirties rephrased contemporary Tin Pan Alley tunes revealed them in them subtlety, vitality and depth not to be discerned in the stilted symmetry of the publisher's song sheets. To appreciate Stacey's command of style, listen to Day In - Day Out and hear the natural ease with which she varies the recurring pattern of the song's title. Then go on to the vivacious It's Delovely and marvel at the way the melody is thrown to-and-fro across the beat without sacrificing one syllable of the essential words.
Swing, elegant variation, impeccable pitch and diction -- these are all stock in trade of an accomplished jazz singer, and to combine them all is an achievement in itself.
What makes Stacey Kent so remarkable is her "sound" -- the word usually applied to jazz instrumentalists to encompass tone quality and the manipulation of it. The voice itself is an impressive instrument, in pitch and timbre, coming closer to Mildred Bailey than to her acknowledged idols Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Strong and clear, it has the invigorating tang of Vermouth.
The use to which Stacey puts this voice is richly varied and highly original. Most idiosyncratic is her use of vibrato, an element which, whether in singing or in playing, provides a vital but often overlooked clue to a jazz artist's identity. She is not alone in using what is known, somewhat disconcertingly as "terminal vibrato", the brief "shake" postponed to the very end of an evenly sustained note. What is unique to her is the use of vibrato to give individual syllables and sometimes whole phrases a sort of fluttering energy. There's a fine example in the very first bars of the CD itself, when the opening phrases of the verse to "More Than You Know" quiver with electricity.
Of course, all the magic hitherto described could be subverted by inappropriate or insensitive accompaniment. Stacey is richly served by her quintet here. The partnership between her voice and Jim Tomlinson's tenor saxophone is sublime. The latter captures the spirit rather than the substance of Lester Young, whose way it was not to expand a tune with harmonic exploration, but to probe for the essence of it, often in the process using fewer notes than the theme itself. Listening to Jim's solos such as in "Sleep Warm", the keyword that comes to my mind is patience -- no rushing to fill spaces with irrelevant padding, no pressing need to launch into paraphrase until the moment is ripe.
So perfect is the integration of the group as a whole that, ideally, this note should be written in the form of a "round robin" so that no order of precedence is implied. As a rhythm section David Newton, Colin Oxley, Andy Cleyndert and Steve Brown respond with faultless sensitivity, born of experience, to the mood of each song. Solos everywhere are of the highest class, with Dream Dancing especially evoking intoxicating stuff from piano and guitar. For me, nothing sums up the rapport and cohesion of the team more concisely than the warmly relaxed bossa nova treatment of Close Your Eyes -- a shameless exercise in group seduction.
I can't conceive of a more auspicious debut than this.
