Stacey Kent

Why listen to Stacey Kent rather than to Ella, say, or Billie or the other great singers from the swing era? A friend asked me this recently and my initial response was one of irritation. 'That's like asking: why Toni Morrison rather than Henry James? They're wonderful artists from different eras and it's daft choosing between them.' But I suppose my friend deserved a better answer. He was wondering, I'd guess, if a young contemporary artist of today could work authentically in a style of music that had had its heyday over half a century ago.

Having thought further, I realise that for me it's partly the very fact of her being contemporary that makes Stacey special. My encounter with the first Stacey Kent album in 1997 was a revelation precisely because I was hearing reinterpreted - without any sense of pastiche - those great swing era songs in a voice at once steeped in tradition but somehow fresh and unmistakably that of an urbane woman of today. She, and her sublime small band, were revealing to me a hitherto unsuspected universality in those old songs. They were demonstrating how that treasure trove from the past could more than convincingly express the yearnings, hopes and broken dreams of men and women in today's confused, fragmented world.

But maybe a simpler answer to my friend would have been that Stacey Kent is a singer to match the greats of the past, with an unusual power to hold your attention and control your emotions from the first note.

Why? For one thing, Stacey's singing never lets us forget these songs are about people. Her protagonists come to life so fully in her voice you sometimes have to remind yourself the CD has no visuals. She has, in fact, much in common with today's finest screen actors who, assured of the camera's ability to pick out detail, portray complex shades of personality, motive and feeling through subtle adjustments of face and posture.

Like them, Stacey has complete mastery of her tools, but hardly allows us to be aware of them. In song after song, we find a route to the emotional heart of the music without first having to admire her technique.

It's been said that one of the most appealing qualities of Stacey's style is that it is 'conversational.' I'd go one step further. She conveys as well as any other singer I've heard the sense of a person talking to herself; the faltering hesitancies, the exuberant rushes of inner thought. There is invariably a lover being addressed, but in Stacey's readings that lover is never in the room. The lyric is what the singer wishes to say, or wishes she had said. We're witnessing a private moment.

No surprise then to find on this latest album emotions being portrayed never in primary colours, but always subtly shaded. These thirteen Richard Rodgers songs move between the themes of love found and love lost. But it's never as straightforward as sunshine followed by dark despair. She may convey wonderfully the giddy intoxication of love, and yet she does sound, well, intoxicated - and vulnerable; like a sophisticate who's suddenly left herself open to naiveté. Then every three or four tracks - as though to confirm our fears - we discover her disappointed and let down, singing something like IT NEVER ENTERED MY MIND or EASY TO REMEMBER. But what's curious and unique in these exquisitely rendered ballads (and what makes her distinct from Billie Holiday, say, or that other fine singer of her generation, Diana Krall) is the absence of bitterness. What we get is someone going over the broken pieces of her life, trying to coax from somewhere a little courage and perspective. Here's a great jazz diva of our age.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Author, July 2002