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Grammy nominated singer prepares for release of The Changing Lights and major tour in the autumn

Singer Stacey Kent is to be presented with a gold disc for her 2003 Candid album The Boy Next Door, reflecting sales of 100,000 units at the concert, in London’s Cadogan Hall on 14 June. It’s an album that goes to the heart of the Great American Songbook featuring a selection of Kent’s signature interpretations, notably ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’ and ‘The Trolley Song’.

The New Jersey-born singer, who first came to prominence from within the London jazz scene at the peak of the jazz vocals boom in the early-noughties, will reprise songs from The Boy Next Door as well as other more recent material.

This concert at the central London venue located near Sloane Square comes just a few months ahead of the release of Kent’s latest album The Changing Lights, the title track of which the singer first debuted in Liverpool and London during the final round of concerts touring Dreamer In Concert, her latest album. The song, written for her by the longstanding songwriting partnership of The Remains of The Day novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and the singer’s husband saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, Kent performed to a receptive Ronnie Scott’s jazz club audience during the singer’s most recent residency at the Soho institution. 

‘The Changing Lights’, is, if anything, an even stronger, more intimate number than ‘The Ice Hotel’, Ishiguro and Tomlinson’s most well known number, which appeared on the Grammy nominated Blue Note album Breakfast on the Morning Tram, embued as it is with a certain loneliness and big city melancholia implicit in its atmosphere and lyrics.

At this stage there are no details at all about the new album the first by Stacey Kent for Blue Note since Universal acquired the label as part of its take-over of EMI last year. But it’s possible ‘This Happy Madness’ (‘Estrada Branca’), a Jobim song with English lyrics written by the late Gene Lees the former Downbeat editor a writer Stacey warmed to as she has also interpreted Lees’ take on both ‘Dreamer’ and ‘Quiet Nights’, might well be included. Jobim recorded the song with Frank Sinatra, on the fabled Sinatra-Jobim Sessions, and this stole the show at Ronnie’s as reported at the time in these pages. MB
www.cadoganhall.com