At a time when we tend to evaluate a singer on her chest, Stacey Kent makes a courageous choice. She does it with lace, phrasing, subtle tempo and breath. A crooner in the most elegant sense of the word. Everything is in the mastery, the restraint. Listening to her, one thinks of some great masters of the genre: Julie London, Henri Salvador. Stacey Kent has always loved to sing, but she never thought that singing would be her life.
His first interest was in comparative literature. Music came back into his life during a stay at the Guildhall School of Music in London. This time it was very serious. In 1997, Stacey Kent released “Close your eyes”, her first album, her first collaboration with Jim Tomlison, saxophonist and composer. From the first notes, the essence of Stacey Kent is set: the voice is velvet, silky and precise, the breath is stretched on a single note, without ever losing the tempo, all in subtlety obviously. A lesson of maintenanceOver the years, the singer went through what is known as the Great American Songbook, from Gershwin to Burt Bacharach to Cole Porter. This repertoire of standards was later enriched with original compositions by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro, and with classics from elsewhere: Michel Legrand, Henri Salvador, with a slight predilection for bossa nova. “Songs from other places” is the title of his latest album, which includes Paul Simon’s “American Tune”, recorded in the wake of the assault on the Capitol.
An evening in partnership with the Mairie 1-7
Copyright © Benoit Peverelli
Stacey Kent : vocals
Jim Tomlinson : sax
Graham Harvey : piano
Josh Morrison : drums
Mátyás Hofecker : double bass
