Kent was nominated for a Grammy Award[2] and was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) by the French Minister of Culture in 2009.[3] She is married to saxophonist, composer Jim Tomlinson,[4] who produces Kent's albums and writes songs for her with his lyricist partner, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.[5]
Early life and education
Kent was born in South Orange, New Jersey.[6] Her paternal grandfather was Russian and grew up in France.[7] After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, she traveled to England to study music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where she met saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, whom she married on August 9, 1991.[2][8] Kent also attended Middlebury College Language Schools in Middlebury, VT for 8 summers, enrolled in the Italian, German, Portuguese and French programs.
Career
Kent began her professional career in the 1990s, singing at Café Bohème in London's Soho.[9] After two or three years, she began opening for established acts at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London.[10] In 1995, she appeared in Richard Loncraine's film Richard III (starring Ian McKellen), singing "Come Live with Me and Be My Love" (composed by Trevor Jones) at the Grand Ball celebrating the Yorkist triumph in the Wars of the Roses.[11] Her first album, Close Your Eyes, was released in 1997.[12][13]
Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the liner notes to Kent's 2003 album, In Love Again.[5] Ishiguro met Kent after he chose her recording of "They Can't Take That Away from Me" as one of his Desert Island Discs in 2002.[5] In 2006, Tomlinson and Ishiguro began to write songs for her.[5] Ishiguro has said of his lyric writing that "with an intimate, confiding, first-person song, the meaning must not be self-sufficient on the page. It has to be oblique, sometimes you have to read between the lines" and that this realization has had an "enormous influence" on his fiction writing.[14][5]
Tomlinson and Ishiguro subsequently wrote songs for her albums Dreamer, The Changing Lights and I Know I Dream, and continue to write for her.[5][17]
Popular success
Stacey Kent onstage in 2016
Kent's album The Boy Next Door achieved Gold album status in France in September 2006. Breakfast on the Morning Tram (2007) achieved Platinum album status in France in November 2007 and Double Gold status in Germany in February 2008. Raconte-moi... was recorded in French and achieved Gold status in both France and Germany and became the second best selling French-language album worldwide in 2010.[18][19][20]
In 2013, Kent released The Changing Lights, a Brazilian-tinged album, covering bossa nova classics such as Jobim's "How Insensitive" and again collaborating with Tomlinson and Ishiguro. In 2014, she left Warner Bros. and signed with Sony. Sony released Tenderly, an album of standards with Roberto Menescal, one of the founders of bossa nova. She met Menescal in Brazil in 2011 at the 80th birthday celebration of the Christ the Redeemer statue. They discovered they were fans of each other's work and collaborated on an album of standards inspired by Menescal's admiration for the duo of Julie London and Barney Kessel.[23][24]
In 2014, Marcos Valle invited her to tour in celebration of the 50th anniversary of his career. They recorded the album Ao Vivo and a DVD that was recorded live at the Birdland club in New York City and the Blue Note in Tokyo.[25][26]
In 2017, Kent recorded her next album for Sony, I Know I Dream: The Orchestral Sessions, her first album with an orchestra, comprising 58 musicians with arrangements by Tommy Laurence, with music from the Great American Songbook, French chansons, songs by Edu Lobo, Jobim, Tomlinson, Ishiguro, Ladeira and his songwriting partner, Cliff Goldmacher from Nashville. Tomlinson and Goldmacher wrote the title song.[27][28]
In 2020, Kent released a series of singles and EPs, including "Christmas in the Rockies", "Three Little Birds", "Lovely Day", "Landslide", "I Wish I Could Go Travelling Again", "Bonita" and "Craigie Burn" as a duet with her longtime pianist Art Hirahara. Several of these singles become part of an album released in October 2021, "Songs From Other Places", for which Kent won Best Vocal Performance at the Jazz Music Awards in Atlanta, Georgia in October 2022.[29][30]
Kent has sold more than 2 million albums worldwide and over 400 million streams.[31]
^Graybow, Steve (30 January 1999). "Vocalist Stacey Kent Hopes to Make Grade in U.S." Billboard. Nielsen Business Media, Inc. p. 38. ISSN 0006-2510. Retrieved 17 January 2023
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