Stacey Kent, born in New Jersey, USA, has moved to UK to study there. Since 1990, her career was taking off at Cafe Boheme in London’s Soho. Her first album ‘Close your Eyes’ was released in 1997. Since then, Kent released 9 albums. In 2002, Stacey received BBC Award as the Best Vocalist. Her Albums ‘The Boy Next Door’ and ‘Breakfast on the Morning Tram’ have been certified Golden and Platinum discs in France. In 2011, Stacey released an album titled ‘Dreamer in Concert’, which is the first live album of hers, recorded at La Cigale Theatre, Paris. The Georgian audience had a pleasure to listen to ‘Dreamer In Concert’ live at Tbilisi Event Hall on April 20.
“Stacey Kent sings from the soul. She tells us her stories with faultless phrasing and in a lucid, enchanting voice. On the stage of La Cigale, last May in Paris, Stacey shared intimate and intensely emotional moments with a knowing and captivated audience, who had flown in from all around the world to take part in the recording of her first live album. Today, it is our great pleasure to be able to present this radiant, generous and sincere artist on the resulting album, ‘Dreamer In Concert’,” Misha Giorgadze, Founder of Eastern Promotion company that managed to bring the star after a 5 year-long negotiations, commented.
After 8 studio albums, ‘Dreamer In Concert’ is the first album that captures Stacey’s magical onstage persona. From the stage of La Cigale, she delivers fresh interpretations of some of the most emblematic songs in her repertoire, including the standards of the ‘Great American Songbook’, ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’, ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’, ‘It Might As Well Be Spring’ and others. She also revisits the classic French songs, ‘Ces’t Petits Riens’, ‘Samba Saravah’ and ‘Jardin d’Hiver’…
The repertoire also includes 4 previously unrecorded selections; 2 from Antonio Carlos Jobim, ‘Waters of March’ and ‘Dreamer’, and 2 new compositions by her husband, saxophonist and the album’s producer, Jim Tomlinson; ‘Postcard Lovers’, with lyrics by the novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro (author of ‘Remains of the Day’ and ‘Never Let Me Go’) and ‘O Comboio’, penned by the Portuguese poet, Antonio Ladeira, which Stacey sings, beautifully, in Portuguese. Indeed so sublimely does she sing in Portuguese, that Kent, who is fast becoming a major star in Brazil, is one of just two American artists (the other is James Taylor) invited to perform at the 80th birthday celebration’s of Rio’s world famous landmark, ‘Cristo O Redentor’, on October 12th when over a million people will gather on Copacabana Beach.
In the style of Bossa Nova and Classic Pop together with Jim Tomlinson on the Sax, his spouse, Graham Harvey on piano, Josh Morrison on drums and a bass guitar Jeremy Brown, it did not take long to Stacey to captivate the audience with her very peculiar intellectual manner of singing, exquisite lady persona and a specific individual self. I would call her a marmalade jazzwoman, telling stories each time shes sings, flexible and smooth like jelly. The interaction was there and she cordially thanked Georgians for their active messaged on facebook shortly before coming to Tbilisi. During one hour and a half, the main hit for the audience consisting of all ages of listeners, became the musical extract from ‘My Fair Lady’. She left for Baku.