BANG & OLUFSON : Issue 1, SEPTEMBER 2007

Since its birth almost a hundred years ago, the elusive art of jazz has nimbly stayed one jump ahead of attempts to capture it in a definition.

   There are devotees of early jazz, modern jazz, big-band jazz, cool jazz, hot jazz, and a list of other alternatives long enough to halt us at the gate of this story for at least a paragraph or three - and some of those enthusiasts would defend their particular angle on jazz as the only one that matters. For others, though, jazz is not a style or a collection of styles, but an attitude to music-making; to making sounds as spontaneous and revealing as a burst of laughter, the brief gleam of a tear, the special timbre of a voice. ‘Jazz is only what you are,’ the great trumpeter, singer and musical pioneer Louis Armstrong once said.

Stacey Kent, the New York-raised, London-resident jazz singer, consistently bears out Armstrong’s deceptively simple statement. Her voice is sometimes a whisper, sometimes a confiding murmur, sometimes an exhilarated exclamation; but whatever the idiom or the mood, individual listeners frequently feel that Stacey’s music was intended for their ears only. She has been described as a conversational singer, and her voice certainly remains very close to the rhythms, inflections and informalities of everyday speech. Yet, as the Booker-prizewinning author Kazuo Ishiguro has suggested, it’s more of an inner conversation, though  one that the listener is being invited to overhear without the fear of intruding. ‘She conveys,’ Ishiguro wrote in the liner notes to Stacey Kent’s 2002 album ‘In Love Again’, ‘...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.’

Kazuo Ishiguro might have discovered Stacey Kent as a fan, but has since turned into a sympathetic collaborator. The novelist has written four of the songs on the singer’s new album ‘Breakfast On The Morning Tram’, recorded for the legendary jazz label Blue Note, and one of them - ‘The Ice Hotel’ - became the measure of just how much of the subtle essence of Stacey Kent in live performance would be delivered by B&O’s BeoLab 9 speakers playing a recording of the same song. This wasn’t altogether a like-with-like comparison - a studio rather than a live-audience recording being compared with a stage show - but it undoubtedly confirmed how startlingly a performer’s essence can be retained within the famously protective ‘B&O sphere’ as it travels through the potentially hazardous byways of electronic reproduction.

Stacey Kent and her group played a Friday and Saturday night at Ronnie Scott's in April, weekend slots sometimes frequented by off-the-leash revellers that have been known to be tough tests for quiet performers. But Stacey’s ruminations had the inhabitants of the room straining for every sound. ‘The Ice Hotel’ describes that breathtaking residence north of Sweden’s Arctic Circle, which melts and is rebuilt each year. Ishiguro’s love-song is a gently-swaying, softly Latin-tinged swinger (the music is by Stacey’s saxophonist husband Jim Tomlinson) but its rhythmic drive is very underplayed, and there is little to hold a potentially distracted listener’s attention save the swish of cymbals, the counter-melody of an electric guitar, and above all the cool purr of the singer’s voice.

Those fragile elements worked so well in Ronnie Scott's that repetition of the experience with only a disk and a sound-system for company seemed an unlikely prospect. Stacey’s urbane New York inflections elegantly balance the old world of the great songwriters and Ishiguro’s urbane contemporary one. The soft, silvery rustle of Matt Skelton’s cymbal-patterns, the arrival of the guitar’s rejoinders beginning to nudge at Stacey’s tranquil choruses, the glancing hints at the harmony from the keyboards - they all intimately contributed to the making of what Kazuo Ishiguro calls the singer’s ‘private moments’. At the end of her set, there was a silent beat of realisation, then a burst of rapturous applause. Some fairly unsentimental looking characters around the room were shouting ‘we love you’ at the quiet and diminutive performer disappearing from the stage.

A week later, at 9.30 in the morning and in full view of a bustling Brompton Road (with Stacey Kent and Jim Tomlinson at home on the other side of London, preparing for a weekend of northern gigs), those euphoric moments seemed a long way off. Yet when the disk spun, not only did Stacey Kent’s voice hover in a space between the elegant BeoLabs with all its familiar affecting lightness, but those tinkling Matt Skelton cymbal flurries ushered it in with the same caress, and the gathering intensity of the guitar supplied the growing urgency so essential to the interpretation, but which is never overstated. The BeoLabs’ Acoustic Lenses, broadly dispersing the treble sounds crucial to the delicacies of the song, helped create as wide an acoustic space as the jazz room had had. They also beautifully caught an instant on ‘The Ice Hotel’ that’s easy to miss - midway through the song, where the playfully laid-back lyric briefly heats up to the insistence of ‘this is no whim of the moment, I want you to realise’ before it gets lazily playful again. With Stacey Kent’s appetite for the oblique, such a nuance is easy to lose, and the balance and dynamics of all the sounds in the mix is crucial to its survival.

As well as the four Kazuo Ishiguro songs, ‘Breakfast On The Morning Tram’ reflects many of Stacey Kent’s  influences and interests; her mother was a literature teacher who also played piano, and Stacey and her sister Penny used to scat on everything from Loony Toons jingles to Fred Astaire songs and jazz classics in their bedroom as children. ‘Heart Hearted Hannah’ makes a lighthearted appearance, but ‘Landslide’ (from Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks) more soulfully reflects her love of Colorado’s mountains.  ‘Samba Saravah’ (from ‘Un Homme Et Une Femme’) unveils Kent the film fan, and that song and a Serge Gainsbourg selection also blow a kiss to France, where the singer studied as a literature postgrad.

She and Tomlinson now consider the new stage this album represents for them as akin to ‘repotting a plant.’  ‘Things grow differently, spread out into spaces that maybe weren’t there before,’ Tomlinson says. The two artists balance perfectionists’ concern for fine detail with an easy spontaneity so characteristic of jazz musicians. Technology can often reflect the one without the other, but it needs the two to coexist to catch the magic of subtle performers on the wing. Thanks to B&O, that technology exists.

BIOG
Stacey Kent is a New Yorker who came to Europe as a postgraduate language student at the end of the 1980s, met saxophonist Jim Tomlinson in Oxford, and changed tack to enrol on the Guildhall School of Music’s jazz  course. She won a singing role in the modern-dress film version of ‘Richard III’ (starring Ian McKellan), and her handling of Broadway and standard songs was admired by  musician and broadcaster Humphrey Lyttelton, with whose band she began to perform. Her 1997 album of love-songs ‘Close Your Eyes’ was widely acclaimed, and her international career blossomed - to include a month-long run at New York’s Algonquin Hotel, and an appearance at Carnegie Hall. Stacey Kent’s album ‘The Boy Next Door’ stayed on the USA's Billboard Charts for 35 weeks, jazz-lover Clint Eastwood invited her to sing at his 70th birthday party, and Michael Parkinson featured her on his TV show. In 2006, she collaborated with Jim Tomlinson on the latter’s album ‘The Lyric’. She also  won the 2002 BBC Jazz Award for 'Best Vocalist’.

INFLUENCES
1) Joni Mitchell. The Hissing Of Summer Lawns
Stacey Kent describes Joni Mitchell as ‘someone whose music has been with me my entire life. Her story-telling style of lyric writing was one of the models that we discussed with Kazuo Ishiguro in working on the new songs for the album.’ Along with the classics ‘Blue’ and ‘Hejira’, this represents Mitchell coming into her majestic prime.  

2) Nick Drake. An Introduction.
‘The first time I heard Nick Drake singing “River Man”’, Stacey Kent says, ‘is a moment that will stay with me forever. I was haunted. There is so much sadness in his voice, it's hard to believe he was so young.’ Drake's mournfully compelling themes have been adapted by several jazz artists.

3). Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley. Nancy and Cannonball.
Singer Nancy Wilson and saxophonist Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley were united by a devotion to gospel and soul music  as well as jazz. Stacey Kent calls their encounter  ‘irresistable - two soul-infused musical giants who seem to bring so much out in each other.’

DAILY TELEGRAPH Oct 20, 2007

Stacey Kent
Breakfast on the Morning Tram
Blue Note

Stacey Kent is an excellent singer. She has the air of assurance that marks out the true pro; she also has the problem of all jazz vocalists these days, namely, what to sing? The trouble with standards is that Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald did most of them to perfection half a century ago. New material, on the other hand, tends to be unmemorable.

This new release shows Kent feeling her way towards a solution. There are some new songs, with stylish lyrics by the Booker prize-winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro. She also includes three French pieces, two by Serge Gainsbourg, which she performs with aplomb in a near-native Gallic accent. Add some old but not over-familiar songs and the result is a coherent, classy and highly recommendable album. Martin Gayford

MOJO December 2007

Stacey Kent
Breakfast on the Morning Tram
Blue Note

4-STARS * * * *
This label debut confounds expectations that the singer would spend her whole career producing one finely crafted American Songbook set after another. Husband Jim Tomlinson has produced a delightful post- Peyroux album of warm acoustic jazz-pop full of gentle surprises and exotic touches. Tomlinson's four originals co-written with Kazuo Ishiguro are modest marvels of jazzy elegance.

BILLBOARD October 2007

This jazz disc is vocalist Stacey Kent's first recording project for Blue Note, and it's a thoroughly captivating debut.

The album comprises a dozen tunes, with the pivotal songwriting contributions coming from novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and Jim Tomlinson, who collaborated on four brilliantly eccentric numbers. Ishiguro penned lyrics for "So Romantic," the title track, "The Ice Hotel" and "I Wish I Could Go Traveling Again," touching on subject matter that just doesn't appear in jazz songs. But ultimately, the beauty of this disc lies in Kent's vocals. Her voice has a startling clarity, turning phrase after phrase with subtlety and an impeccable feel for the music. Also note her jazz-wise covers of Stevie Nicks' "Landslide," Serge Gainsbourg's "La Saison des Pluies" and the lovely "Samba Saravah." —

Philip Van Vleck

 

TELERAMA

4-STARS * * * * Quatre Etoiles

Après plusieurs albums réussis de standards, Stacey Kent a voulu changer. Pas de personnalité. Eternelle jeune fille à la voix adolescente elle restera. La voilà un peu plus elle-­même. Elle et son saxophoniste de ­mari, Jim Tomlinson, à la sonorité onctueuse et mate d'un Stan Getz, ont rencontré l'écrivain britannique Kazuo Ishiguro. L'auteur des Vestiges du jour avait envie d'écrire des paroles de chanson. Un si grand écrivain, si proche de leur coeur ! Le surlendemain, ils recevaient deux textes parfaits sur lesquels il n'y avait plus qu'à accrocher une musique. Ces chansons racontent des histoires, c'est rare. L'une parle d'un couple pas encore très intime qui dé­cide d'aller passer quelques jours dans un hôtel où la température est maintenue à - 5 °C. Pour The Ice Hotel, Tomlinson a conçu une mélodie qui tombe bien, comme une robe, avec une échancrure de silence sur une légère syncope. Breakfast on the morning tram est une autre petite merveille : vous vous trouvez au bout de la nuit, le coeur en miettes, il ne reste qu'à monter dans le tram du matin où des inconnus vous attendent avec un réconfortant petit déjeuner.

Tout le disque développe une façon de regarder le monde sans pathos, avec la légèreté de l'optimisme quand il n'est pas niais. On y entend des standards peu connus, follement mélodieux, comme Never let me go, que jouait Bill Evans, ou cette chanson drôle sur une femme méchante, Hard Hear­ted Hannah, que chantait Ella Fitzgerald. La francophile Stacey donne en français deux titres de Gainsbourg qui lui vont comme un gant, Ces petits riens et La Saison des pluies. Et puis elle chante What a wonderful world, que le film Good Morning Vietnam faisait tourner ironique. Elle lui restitue sa confiance en la vie, nimbée d'une mélancolie discrète et émouvante.

Michel Contat

Telerama n° 3013 - 13 octobre 2007

NATIONAL POST CANADA

Refrains of the day

Jazz Singer Stacey Kent Teamed Up With Kazuo Ishiguro For Her Latest Record, Breakfast On The Morning Tram.

Interview with Mike Doherty, September 11, 2007

Well before he became a Booker Prize-winning novelist, the young Kazuo Ishiguro dreamt of making his living as a songwriter. Music publishers, apparently, found his work "hideous," so he drifted into writing fiction. But now, with the help of jazz singer Stacey Kent, he is beginning to realize his first ambition, and his day job can wait.

Ishiguro has penned lyrics for four songs on Breakfast on the Morning Tram, the seventh solo album by the London-based Kent, whose husband, saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, has written the music. Ishiguro was drawn to Kent's way of looking at the past through a modern lens, which he himself does in novels such as Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans.

"She has some way of bridging the gap of the years," he says over the phone from his London home. "There's no nostalgia when Stacey performs classic songs. They seem to me pertinent and relevant."

Stacey Kent's collaboration with Kazuo Ishiguro worked from the start; the author "was describing me, and I already existed."

Ishiguro selected Kent's austere, wistful rendition of Gershwin's They Can't Take That Away from Me as one of his "Desert Island discs" on the BBC radio program of the same name. She could already count the likes of Clint Eastwood and Ian McKellen as famous fans, having sung at both of their birthday parties, but as a graduate from Sarah Lawrence College in comparative literature, she found the regard of a novelist of Ishiguro's stature an unmissable opportunity. At first, she asked him to write liner notes for her 2002 album In Love Again.

Sitting with Tomlinson in a Toronto music store, the effusive singer recalls: "It was a perfect match, kind of like that movie Stranger than Fiction:He was describing me, and I already existed. He had this way of understanding where I came from."

From there, it was a no-brainer for her to seek a musical collaboration, especially at a time when, having tackled novels and screenplays (The Saddest Music in the World, The White Countess), Ishiguro wanted to return to his first artistic love.

In sorting out how they might work together, as Ishiguro recalls, "the question was, do we try to create a kind of ersatz 1930s song, with Broadway-type slang, or do we try and create something of today? But if we did that, there was the danger that it would pull Stacey and Jim out of the musical territory that they're so good at. We kicked around how we might come up with something that still harked back to that kind of music but nevertheless was modern."

Kent, it seems, wanted him to write lyrics for love songs, but "she needed at least a tiny bit of hope. She didn't want songs of anguish and desolation. She could see the danger, perhaps, from reading my books."

The results, songs such as The Ice Hotel and the title track, Breakfast on the Morning Tram, combine a light-hearted tone, a clever sense of humour and the kind of emotional subtext that Kent is so skilled at bringing out with her subtly expressive delivery.

The only potential problem was that Ishiguro tended to go on a bit. "I'm used to writing novels," he admits. "I sat down and wrote what I thought was a normal-length song. It's only when they sang a rough version of what they had that I realized, 'My God, this is an awful lot of lyrics!'"

Kent, however, was impressed: "They're long; they're complete," she says of the songs. "I love that: I get this glimpse into somebody's life, which becomes my life when I'm singing the song. We definitely wanted to stay away from that 'stanza, stanza, solo, stanza and out' formula."

As a result, she and Tomlinson came up with music that re-imagines the jazz vocal album, where there is less soloing per se, but the players are constantly reacting to Kent's performance and to the nuances in the lyrics. In this sense, their album feels more contemporary than ever -- it resembles recent work by jazz masters such as Wayne Shorter, Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau, in which the music takes on the form of a conversation rather than a series of monologues.

"There's this notion," says Tomlinson, "that you can achieve more as musicians, as artists, if you're willing to sacrifice something of the ego to the collective."

Ishiguro found himself working in the same way -- while a novelist is used to having complete control of a fictional world (save, perhaps, for an editor's occasional input), a lyricist, in the tradition of Hart with Rodgers, or Evans with Livingston, has to be willing to share an artistic vision with the writer of the music.

"This was slightly scary," admits Ishiguro. "I was in a bit of a vacuum. Inevitably you do have to hum fairly awful melodies to yourself [while writing], but I was trying not to do so. It was a surprise every time -- Jim would come up with something that wasn't generic."

While the album is finished, the collaboration continues: "He's sending us some new material, and a couple I've just read are hilarious," Kent enthuses.

Ishiguro, meanwhile, has been writing short stories about musicians, but he finds the lyric-writing "as satisfying as anything I've done. As a big bonus, it doesn't take nearly as long." - Breakfast on the Morning Tram is released today by Blue Note.

© National Post 2007

 

M LA MUSIC Sept 07

par Jean-Marc Grosdemouge

Après avoir repris (sublimement) "Que feras-tu de ta vie ?" de Michel Legrand, Stacey Kent reprend "Samba Saravah", titre bossa nova de Baden Powell avec les paroles en français adaptées par Pierre Barouh pour le film "Un homme et une femme".

Sur la version originale, Barouh se déclare "le français le plus Brésilien de France". Elevée à New York et aujourd?hui installée les montagnes du Colorado avec son compagnon Jim Tomlinson, qui joue saxs et flûte et produit ce disque, Stacey Kent n?est pas "peut être" mais sûrement la jazzwoman américaine la plus française d?Amérique. Reprenant deux titres de Gainsbourg ("Ces petits riens", "La saison des pluies") elle qui a vécu et étudié à Paris comme son grand père avant elle, signe un joli album de classic jazz, où elle excelle dans les ballades douces-amères. On a l?impression, en tenant ce disque, de tenir une vieille galette, avec une jolie photo signée Francis Wolff... sauf que le noir et blanc cède la place à la couleur.

La voix de Stacey est couleur de l?aube. "The dawn is filled with dreams" chante-t-elle. Délaissant le grand Répertoire Jazz® (Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, Charmichael, etc.) qui avait été son habit jusque là, elle s?essaie à une reprise de Fleetwood Mac ("Landslide", signée Steve Nicks), et tout de même conclut avec le classique "What a wonderful world", tout alangui, mais la nouveauté réside dans les chansons composées par Tomlinson et sur lequelles Kasuo Ishiguro, son grand admirateur, pose ses mots. Pour son premier album pour Blue Note (elle réalise ainsi un rêve de gosse tout en exaucant le notre puisque chaque mélomane qui aime découvrir un bon disque), Stacey Kent promène sa voix mutine avec décontraction, sans jamais forcer le moins du monde. Stacey n?est pas dans la démonstration mais dans l?émotion, elle raconte une histoire. Elle est charmante, ravissante... on pourrait égrener longtemps les rimes en "ante".

Car elle enchante. Si on n?a pas toujours bien saisi les choix artistiques de Blue Note ces derniers temps (le label semblait plus pop que jazz), on a l?impression en lisant les notes de pochette de Robert G Kaiser de lire celles d?un classique d?hier. Un classsique serait-il en train de naître sous nos yeux ?

 

 

Having previously demonstrated a knowing way with sets from the Great American Songbook and a special bent for Brazilian-flavored melodies, vocalist Stacey Kent takes on a different sort of mix here. And succeeds brilliantly, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been listening to her, for this porcelain princess has gradually moved into the front rank of current young singers. Her voice—is it mercury or is it clear water running over stones in a brook?—falls ever so easily on the ear, managing the neat feat of being as light as a butterfly yet emotionally substantial.

 

The opening tune, “The Ice Hotel,” Kazuo Ishiguro and Jim Tomlinson’s newly-minted enigmatic gem, charms with her deliciously clear delivery. The title track is another newbie by Ishiguro-Tomlinson that has Kent painting a savvy word portrait of an Amsterdam morning. The more familiar “Never Let Me Go” is typical of how skillfully she can wend her way through deeper moments while never losing her particular lightness.

 

Whether it’s the playfully French “Ces petits riens” or the samba mood of Bergman-Mendes’ “So Many Stars,” Kent’s a Loreley to whom one surrenders unreservedly. -- Andrea Verez