About Stacey Kent
Stacey Kent is an American jazz singer from South Orange, New Jersey.
Kent was nominated for a Grammy Award and was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2009. She is married to saxophonist and composer Jim Tomlinson, who produces Kent's albums and writes songs for her with his lyricist partner, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.
Kent was born in South Orange, New Jersey. Her paternal grandfather was Russian and grew up in France. 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. Kent also attended Middlebury College Language Schools in Middlebury, VT for 8 summers, enrolled in the Italian, German, Portuguese and French programs.
Kent began her professional career in the 1990s, singing at Café Bohème in London's Soho. After two or three years, she began opening for established acts at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London. In 1995, she appeared in Richard Loncraine's film Richard III , singing "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" with lyrics by Christopher Marlowe and composed by Trevor Jones, at the Grand Ball celebrating the Yorkist triumph in the Wars of the Roses. Her first album, Close Your Eyes, was released in 1997.
Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the liner notes to Kent's 2002 album, In Love Again. 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. In 2006, Tomlinson and Ishiguro began to write songs for her. 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. In March, 2024, Ishiguro published a book entitled The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: lyrics for Stacey Kent, containing 16 of his lyrics for Kent, with illustrations by Italian-French artist, Bianca Bagnarelli, .
Tomlinson and Ishiguro co-wrote four songs on the album Breakfast on the Morning Tram. The first of their songs, "The Ice Hotel", won first prize in the International Songwriting Competition in April 2008. Kent recorded several more Tomlinson/Ishiguro songs on Dreamer In Concert, The Changing Lights, and I Know I Dream: The Orchestral Sessions.
Tomlinson and Ishiguro subsequently wrote songs for her albums Dreamer, The Changing Lights and I Know I Dream, and continue to write for her.
Map & Directions To Venue
