Stacey Kent is a jazz
singer in the mold of the greats with honors including a GRAMMY®
nomination, album sales approaching 2 million, Gold,
Double-Gold and Platinum-selling
albums that have reached a series of No. 1 chart positions during the
span of her career.
Raised
and schooled on the East Coast, this comparative literature graduate with a
musical bent, travelled to Europe to further her studies. In 1990, through a
series of twists of fate, she found herself in London where she enrolled in a
graduate music program at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and where she
met her future husband and musical collaborator, Jim
Tomlinson.
With
a catalogue of 10 studio albums including the Platinum-selling,
GRAMMY® Award-nominated Breakfast On The Morning Tram and an impressive list of
collaborations, Stacey has graced the stages of more than 50 countries over the
course of her career. Kent paid her dues
in the jazz clubs of London, including the famed Ronnie Scott's Cub, where she
still performs every year. The Boy Next Door was Stacey’s first
album to achieve Gold status.
Stacey
has cemented her reputation as a singer capable of putting a distinctive stamp
on an impressive repertoire of standards. With each successive album, Stacey's
style has become more honed as her artistic outlook has broadened. Stacey's
search for songs had led her to look beyond the Great American Songbook, with
French chanson and Brazilian music forming an ever-larger part of her
repertoire.
During
a lunch with her husband and friend, and author, Kazuo Ishiguro, the
conversation turned to repertoire and the idea was hatched to write a series of
songs for Stacey that distilled themes of memory, travel and love. From this
conversation, the songs for Breakfast On
The Morning Tram were conceived and Stacey transformed from being a singer
of the Great American Songbook to a singer with a highly distinctive and
personal repertoire.
The
album, The Changing Lights, revealed
an ever-present influence of Brazil in Stacey’s music. Stacey first visited Brazil in 2008 when she
was invited to perform at the TIM Festival. On subsequent visits to Brazil, she
met many of her musical heroes, including Marcos Valle and Roberto Menescal.
She has recorded with both Valle and Menescal having been invited to record
with Valle to celebrate his 50 years in music on the album, Ao Vivo.
With
Roberto Menescal, Stacey recorded the release, Tenderly, an intimate collection of standards that showcases her
crystalline voice and Menescal's warm guitar. Jazzwise Magazine referred
to the album as “an extremely beautiful meeting of minds.” It is Menescal’s only recording as a jazz
guitarist and demonstrates the debt he owes to the great Barney Kessel. As
Kent’s first standards album in a decade, it shows her increasingly impressive
and maturing interpretative gifts.
Following
a successful concert series with the Bordeaux Symphony Orchestra, Stacey is
planning an album for release this year on SONY.
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We asked you to tell us which of your favorite
new artists you would like to hear on the MCG Jazz stage and we have been able
to arrange for one of those Pix this fall.
Pittsburgh’s own Benny Benack III will be joining the program to celebrate the release of his first solo CD
project. Benny now resides in New York
City and travels the world as a soloist, leader and educator.
He is both a formidable,
modern-minded trumpeter and an affable and expressive jazz singer, and these
elements of his musical self are deeply and effortlessly intertwined. On One of a Kind, his debut release, Benack also
reveals himself to be a wry and expressive songwriter and lyricist, bringing
his boundless musical gifts together in a program that’s steeped in tradition
but every bit as restlessly individual as his album title suggests.
Benack’s original compositions (both
vocal and instrumental) paint a self-portrait in sound, honoring a legacy that
stretches back to Benny Benack, Sr., his trumpeter/bandleader grandfather.
Having grown up playing gigs with his father Benny, Jr., and absorbing
influences from his classically trained vocal professor and mother Claudia,
Benny III became the kind of player, writer and interpreter we hear today on One of a Kind: Benack comments, “I gravitated
first to the legends of Tin Pan Alley. I find myself identifying not only with
their timeless harmonic and melodic sensibilities, but also the whimsical
charms of their musings on romance and melancholy. I would love for my songs to
capture the essence of that magical Golden Era.”