Stacey Kent's voice is soft, warm, and very quiet. She sounds like she is telling a private secret or singing a sweet lullaby just for you.
She has built an international career by doing something that looks deceptively simple: getting completely inside a song.
The Grammy-nominated jazz singer is known for an understated, intimate style that puts lyrics and storytelling at the center. As The New Yorker wrote, Kent “transforms songs into short stories that brim with passion, romance, and wonder.” Her repertoire travels freely through the Great American Songbook, French chanson, Brazilian music and original compositions, sung in several languages and shaped by a lifelong curiosity about words, places and people.
That love of language has led to one of the more unusual collaborations in contemporary jazz. Since 2006, Kent’s husband and longtime musical partner, saxophonist and composer Jim Tomlinson, has written songs for her with Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Their work explores many of the same subjects that run through Ishiguro’s fiction: memory, travel, longing and the complicated ways we understand our own lives.
Kent’s career has taken her to nearly 60 countries, with more than two million albums sold and over one billion streams. Her 2007 album Breakfast on the Morning Tramearned a Grammy nomination, and her recordings have received Gold and Platinum certifications and numerous international honors. Along the way, she has collaborated with Brazilian masters including Marcos Valle, Roberto Menescal and Danilo Caymmi.
Her latest album, A Time For Love, returns to the spare setting of voice and piano with longtime collaborator Art Hirahara, joined on several tracks by Tomlinson. Songs by Johnny Mandel, Serge Gainsbourg, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Brian Wilson and Stevie Wonder sit alongside new work by Tomlinson and lyricist Cliff Goldmacher.
For all the scope of her career, Kent’s music works through small details: the turn of a phrase, a subtle shift in melody, the meaning hidden inside a lyric. In the close quarters of Caffè Lena, there’s nowhere for those details to get lost.
No photography and please silence all cell phones.
The Peak Jazz Series is made possible by the generous support of Joseph & Luann Conlon in memory of Joel Moss.
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