It is little wonder that Stacey Kent is so enthused about why 2024 promises to be such a “great and thrilling year”. The acclaimed American singer will be on stage at the Southbank with Kazuo Ishiguro – to perform and talk about the lyrics the Nobel Prize-winning author has written for her – and then she will be touring her superb new album Summer Me, Winter Me, including six nights of concerts at Ronnie Scott’s, before finishing the year playing with Brazilian maestro Danilo Caymmi, in gigs to celebrate the music of the late Tom Jobim.
Stacey Kent’s own repertoire is eclectic and her influences are rich and varied. She and her sister love the jazz of Horace Silver and she remembers vividly that, when growing up in New York, the nearby Tower Records store was somewhere “I almost lived in”. Her love of Brazilian music is palpable and she describes hearing the 1964 Verve classic Getz/Gilberto (Stan Getz and Brazilian guitarist João Gilberto) as “a pivotal moment in my life”.
As we chat via Zoom from her home in Virginia, Kent, who was born in New Jersey in 1965, says she can still remember the excitement that almost exploded when Ishiguro, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day, chose her interpretation of George Gershwin’s They Can’t Take That Away From Me as one of his selections for his 2002 appearance on Desert Island Discs. “That was an immense moment and I was completely blown away because I loved his work,” she says.
The pair subsequently corresponded and gradually became firm friends. Around six years later, when she and her composer husband Jim Tomlinson were out to lunch with Ishiguro and his wife Lorna, discussion arose about whether the novelist should write a song for Kent. “It was a life-changing and musically life changing moment,” she says.
Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki and moved with his family to Surrey at the age of six, had been writing songs since he was 15. He went speedily to work. “The first two sets of lyrics arrived in the post two weeks after that lunch,” recalls Kent. “He sent us The Ice Hotel and Breakfast on the Morning Tram. I read them aloud to Jim and there was a ‘Eureka!’ moment. Jim immediately said I can hear how these wonderful words can be set to music; and the way they were written, with no repeats, gave him a clean slate for the arrangements.”
The latter song was recorded for Kent’s 2007, Grammy-nominated Blue Note album Breakfast On The Morning Tram and the lyrics for it are among the 16 compositions that feature in Ishiguro’s new book, The Summer We Crossed Europe In The Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent, which will be published by Faber on 7 March. This printed celebration of one of the most interesting music-literary collaborations in 21st-century jazz features gorgeous illustrations from Italian cartoonist Bianca Bagnarelli.
The serendipitous nature of the Ishiguro-Kent-Tomlinson collaboration reflects something about Kent’s own optimistic view of the way things can suddenly spin in your favour in life. “You never know who you are going to meet around the corner who can change your entire life and entire path,” she says.
Kent, who is multilingual and who had studied literature and languages for her degree, had lived in Germany for a time before a trip to England in her early twenties changed the course of her life. “I had a really flukey moment after I came to England,” she recalls. “I saw an advertisement hanging on a wall in Oxford during a visit there. It was to do a one-year postgraduate course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I was still kind of addicted to going to school and I thought I would love to study music. In truth, I thought it would be a playful interlude and then I could go back to my studies and do a masters. I ended up meeting Jim at the Guildhall, getting gig offers around Soho and having the time of my life living a musician’s life as a young, just-out-of-college student. My music life suddenly got serious and I stayed with it.”
Kent, who went on to release more than 15 albums and who was the recipient of the Prix Ella Fitzgerald award at the 2023 Montreal Jazz Festival, reworked an old live version of Ishiguro’s beguiling Postcard Lovers for her new album Summer Me, Winter Me (Naïve Records), a collection of covers of popular standards from over the decades, including Under Paris Skies and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Happy Talk. “There was something about the original interpretation of Postcard Lovers that irked me and Jim because it did not feel finished. Jim revisited it and we started to do it in three-four time with a changed melody and new arrangements and, boom ,it was great,” she says proudly. It is a highlight of an impressive album.
Kent says she remains “fuelled” by a desire to communicate with her fans and says she “loves storytelling and connection”. Her rare ability to really get inside a story song and transmit something potent to audiences – whether interpreting the Great American Songbook or singing from her catalogue with Ishiguro and Tomlinson – makes her concerts feel like a special shared experience. Ishiguro, for his part, believes Kent has a remarkable gift for making her song’s protagonists “come to life”. “She has 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,” he wrote. “She is a great jazz diva of our age.”
Kent says she and the author (whom she refers to throughout as “Ish”) talk a lot about movies and that she enjoys his dry wit and sense of fun. They genuinely sound like kindred spirits. “I have learned a lot of music from Ish. There is such a shared commonality, a shared sensibility and that is what he probably heard in me. He is incredibly perceptive; talk about being open-eared and open-eyed and open-hearted.” It was Ishiguro who suggested that Kent recorded a version of Paul Simon’s American Tune. “It had never occurred to me,” she remarked. “Ish is also a good singer. Sometimes when we meet, he’ll be playing the guitar and sing for us, sometimes some folk music. He could have been a musician but thank God he is a novelist, because he is a giant of literature,” she adds.
When Kent, saxophonist Tomlinson and pianist Art Hirahara appear at Southbank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on Saturday 30 March in ‘An Evening with Kazuo Ishiguro & Stacey Kent’, the evening will include interviews and performances of songs, including the book’s title song The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain. It promises to be a wonderful night. “With Ish and Jim, I have two people who know me and love me and understand me,” Kent says. “They work so well together as a team and to sing their tailor-made songs, full of pain and heartache and also a window of hope, is an indescribable joy.”
Stacey Kent, Summer Me, Winter Me is out on Naïve Records. The Summer We Crossed Europe In The Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent by Kazuo Ishiguro is published by Faber on 7 March, £17.99
One Response