Product Description

After 10 years and 6 albums on the indie label, Candid, Stacey Kent finally releases her major label debut on Blue Note Records. A multi-award winner (2001 British Jazz Award, 2002 BBC Jazz Award Best Vocalist, etc) Stacey has built a huge fanbase for her cool, classy interpretations of the Great American Songbook, all recorded with husband, arranger, producer and now songwriter Jim Tomlinson (himself a winner of the 2006 Album of the Year British Jazz Award). On "Breakfast..." Jim contributes 4 new songs written with the writer Kazuo Ishiguro - one of a legion of fans that Stacey has attracted over the years (they met after he played one of her songs on Desert Island Discs!!) and this is the first time that they have featured their own songs on an album. Stacey tours constantly - she even turned down an appearance on Parkinson because she was playing a gig (admittedly this would have been her second performance on Parkinson, which in itself is quite unique) - and has built up a very sizeable fanbase which will be determined to get the album as soon as possible. However, since Stacey is out of the UK through September we will be focusing our promotion and marketing push at the start of October as a preview to the forthcoming residency at Ronnie Scotts in November 1st - 3rd. Stacey will be available for press and promotion in late September/early October and we fully expect to find her on some major shows. In the past, her appearances on shows such as Parkinson, CBS Sunday Morning in the USA and even Swedish tv have driven an immediate and impressive sales response pushing her to number 1 and 2 in the Amazon.com charts as an example. As well as the Ronnie Scott dates in November Stacey will play a significant number of dates in the UK both this year. See below for information.

More from Stacey Kent

The Boy Next Door	In Love Again - The Music of Richard Rodgers	Close Your Eyes
Love Is...The Tender Trap	Dreamsville	Let Yourself Go: Celebrating Fred Astaire
Collection	Collection II	The Lyric

Track Listing

1. The Ice Hotel
2. Landslide
3. Ces Petits Riens
4. I Wish I Could Go Travelling Again
5. So Many Stars
6. Samba Saravah
7. Breakfast On the Morning Tram
8. Never Let Me Go
9. So Romantic
10. Hard Hearted Hannah
11. La Saison Des Pluies
12. What a Wonderful World

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26476 in Music
• Released on: 2007-10-02
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

No Samples?
Too bad there is not a way to hear a sample of the cuts without viewing that long and wandering video. What happened Amazon?

OK, let me make it simple for you: No sample to hear, no sale!

Don't start your collection with this one!!!
OK. Well, I guess the vast majority of the reviewers are Stacey Kent's best friends. Or it could be they are like the fans of be-bop, who aren't nearly enough of musicians themselves to be able to understand it, yet alone play it, but know "intelligent" people are supposed to like it, so they do. But one way or another, the folks here who are saying that this album is a triumph are selling you the Brooklyn Bridge. Virtually every original song is at the same tempo (dirge-like). The lyrics may be "clever", but so is grand opera (and I don't recommend that either). And the bottom line on this cd is that it is by far her weakest effort if you're a fan of the standards era. Not because the songs aren't "standards," but because the songs are weak.

Here's the easiest example to make this clear (and none of the sycophants can dispute it). I've seen Ms. Kent in concert half a dozen times. Each time, she drew standing ovations not just when finishing for the evening, but literally during the sets. However, at the concert I attended on her tour promoting "Breakfast...", half the audience left at intermission and all night long the crowd kept calling for songs off of other cd's.
So by all means try Stacey Kent. She's absolutely wonderful. But don't spend your money on this one until and unless you completely flip for her after hearing "Let Yourself Go" or one of her other earlier works.

OK, brown nosers. I'm ready for your attacks now. I'm sure you're all fans of tone poems too.

She delivers with elegance..
She may be not as popular as in U.K (where they consider her a British possession ), but the American-born singer always delivers with style.
A recent addition to the Blue Note roster of recording artists, now Stacey Kent boasts in U.K. six best-selling albums, a string of awards, including the 2001 British Jazz Award and 2002 BBC Jazz Award "Best Vocalist", the 2004 Backstage Bistro Award and the 2006 Album of the Year for The Lyric featuring Stacey Kent as well as a fan base that enables her to sell out concert halls around the world.
Her latest album "Breakfast On a Morning Tram" includes a mixture of classic standards as well as new songs written and produced by her husband and saxophonist, Jim Tomlinson, and has on her team a surprise star writer (award-winning novelist) Kazuo Ishiguro, who supplies four angular lyrics on her Blue Note debut.
"She conveys the sense of a person talking to herself". Ishiguro wrote, "the faltering hesitancies, the exuberant rushes of inner thought".
It probably would have been easy for the expat American to continue ploughing a comfortable swing-revivalist furrow.
For the past 10 years, she has been mainly singing numbers form the great American Songbooks. However, on this CD, she sings lesser known beautiful songs (a folksily soulful "Landslide" - from Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks), a couple of Serge Gainsbourg romances delivered in French ( "Ces petits riens" and "La saison des Pluies"') , another pearl of a song, the elegant bossa nova "Samba Savarah", also delicately sung in French and three numbers from the Songbook, a bluesily swinging "Hard Hearted Hannah", "Never let me go" and and an account of "What a Wonderful World" as a wondering whisper.
She did sing Bacharach, Paul Simon and Carole Kind in her previous exquisite album The Boy Next Door , but this CD has a fresher approach.
Full marks to her, then, for having the courage to take this new departure, a collection of songs that occasionally tilts in the direction of Norah Jones, another artist who has made the most of a narrow vocal range.
Kent's light, girlish voice and avoidance of dynamic or emotional extremes is applied here to a wider range of material than the Broadway standards that made her name.
Kent can get a hard time from the cognoscenti for her dinner-jazzy Latin shuffles and faintly coy delivery, and there are certainly times on her albums where you wish John Zorn might crash in.
But the shift from dark, low sounds to edgier ascending pleas is genuinely affecting on "Never Let Me Go". John Parricelli's guitar is a delight, and Jim Tomlinson's soft sax is as supportive as ever; and Kent's timing and care with lyrics shows how much she cares about this fragile world of almost-jazz.
Stacey sounds understandably self-conscious on some of the modern material, but the lissom guitar-based arrangements leave you eager to hear where the next step will take her.
"Her voice is sometimes a whisper, sometimes a confiding murmur, sometimes an exhilarated exclamation; but whatever the idiom or the mood, individual listeners frequently feel that Stacey's music was intended for their ears only". - John Fordham