Stacey Kent performed new song ‘The Changing Lights’, first debuted in Liverpool earlier in her latest UK tour, written for her by distinguished novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and her husband saxophonist Jim Tomlinson last night at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, during the singer’s latest residency at the Soho institution, which celebrated its 53rd anniversary earlier in the week.

Informing the attentive audience that she is shortly to enter the studio for her latest album to be completed some time in the spring, as this tour for her latest album Dreamer In Concert reaches its conclusion shortly, she was coming full circle in her return to Frith Street. Because last year at Ronnie Scott’s, also at Halloween time, the singer started the ball rolling by launching the album in the UK, the follow-up to her mainly French language album Raconte Moi.

Last night the stand out song from earlier album Breakfast On The Morning Tram, ‘The Ice Hotel’, another Ishiguro/Tomlinson collaboration, was a firm highlight of the first set, but ‘The Changing Lights’, is, if anything, an even stronger, more intimate number, with a certain loneliness and big city melancholia implicit in its atmosphere and lyrics.

‘Dreamer’ worked well once again surpassed by the lovely feel of ‘Quiet Nights’, while Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s ‘The Trolley Song’ from Meet Me In Saint Louis she does so well and has recorded in the past was accomplished, even if ‘Waters of March’ was a bit more laboured than her rendition at the club last year.

Kent was joined by Graham Harvey on piano and Rhodes and bassist Jeremy Brown, regular playing partners both, but Stephen Keogh on drums was less familiar, although the experienced Charles McPherson and Tina May sideman read his part very well and gave the drum line a certain straightahead gravitas the material needs especially as the piano was meekly miked and contemplatively performed, contributing to the nocturne-like atmosphere of both sets. Tomlinson played beautifully on tenor sax (it was almost as if we were back in 1964, the year Getz/Gilberto came out) and he also switched to guitar late in the second set, an instrument Stacey had picked up to comp softly on earlier. There was a bit of exuberance at the bar later as a fan expressed his vocal enthusiasm (satisfied minutes later by ‘Hushabye Mountain’) and besides the airing of the new song the highlight, and maybe it will make the album was ‘This Happy Madness’ (‘Estrada Branca’ the title in Portuguese as Kent explained), a Jobim song again with English lyrics by the late Gene Lees, who also wrote English lyrics to ‘Dreamer’ and ‘Quiet Nights’. Jobim recorded the song with Frank Sinatra, on the Sinatra-Jobim Sessions, and this without a shadow of a doubt stole the show only just surpassing the remarkable new song.

Stephen Graham

Stacey Kent continues at Ronnie Scott’s tonight and completes her residency tomorrow

Pictured top Stacey Kent, Kazuo Ishiguro and Jim Tomlinson