A CONVERSATION
WITH STACEY KENT
The world of Stacey Kent was literally turned upside down when she made
the snap decision to take a break from her Comparative Literature degree
to do a course in jazz music. Since then she's not looked back and today
she soothes audiences - young and old - with her cutesy vocal tones. I
meet the woman who - as her latest album title suggests - is living in
Dreamsville.
MELISSA JAMES: I'm intrigued by the idea that a few years ago you came
to Europe simply wanting to take a vacation and instead began a career
as a successful jazz singer - how did it all happen?
STACEY KENT: Well it's funny, the story to me sounds as good as it looks
on paper. I'd done 5 years of college and was a little burnt out on academics.
I was studying Comparative Literature and I loved what I was studying
and figured I would have a career somewhere in an academic field. I came
over to [England] to visit some friends and I stumbled upon this course
at the Guildhall School of Music. At the same time I met Jim, my husband,
who was a similar story to mine. He had just graduated from Oxford and
that's where I was visiting my friends and so we met and there was an
instant chemistry there. He was also a bit of a dabbler [in music] and
he thought he would go on this course too. So I did the course not really
expecting anything from it, but because it was a post-grad course for
people who are going to become professional musicians it was very practical,
so I was getting job offers and getting the chance to sing at gigs.
MJ: At what point did you decide that both music and England were for
you?
STACEY KENT: When the end of the year came it was so obvious that I couldn't
go home. I'd had this great year of music and more important than that
I'd fallen in love with this guy and there was no way I was gonna leave
him. So I called my parents and I basically said I'm not coming home.
They were pretty shocked and I think they sort of figured that I was just
going through something I needed to go through. And then it got serious
'cause I never actually went home. In fact I was home the other day for
Thanksgiving and it's a joke in the family that I'm the only kid who never
officially moved out of the house, I just sort of said goodbye one day
and I never came home again. So just the other day I cleaned out my room
for the first time since I was 17.
MJ: What music styles did you listen to as you were growing up?
STACEY KENT: There was different music in the family. I loved classical
music that my parents were listening to. My mother was a pretty good piano
player - she played Ravel and Mozart and Chopin and I was always listening
to that. And my parents were big opera lovers so there was a lot of that.
And I grew up on things like my brother's Jimi Hendrix, my sister's Simon
& Garfunkel and Carole King and I think that that American folk sort of
hippie stuff was a huge influence on me. It was a very eclectic household
in terms of what was being played on each stereo. And I think that's very
important for me; it gave me the ability to know that you don't have to
come from one lineage to be great at that one thing. Even though I sing
the Great American Songbook and that seems to be the most natural thing
to me, I think what made me stronger is the fact that there's so many
other influences in my head.
MJ: Do you have any childhood memories that illustrate your early passion
for music?
STACEY KENT: I'm the third [child] of four. It was my little sister who
I sang with the most I suppose but all of us did sing a lot. We were a
real movie loving household and y'know how music is just in all those
old movies and I would literally run down to the piano after I'd watch
a movie and try and figure out the theme tune just 'cause I was kind of
curious. I'd watch a Hitchock movie and there was this diminished pattern
through it and I always thought it was kind of cool that I could sing
along with a diminished pattern and knew where it was going. I had a friend
who played guitar and I knew a lot of songs but I didn't know the chords
and I would sing the bass notes to him so that he could figure out the
chords and he'd say "How do you do that?" And the fact is, I didn't know
how I did it, I just could hear certain things.
MJ: Do you think you always wanted to be a singer but never realised it?
STACEY KENT: I think I did. When I was very young I would take my brother's
big boom box and he had one of those really giant sets of headphones that
we used to wear and I took the chord and I would tie it around the handle
and I'd press play. It would be Carole King probably and I'd say "Rolling…"
And I would pretend I was recording and sing in harmony to Carole King.
I think I used to pretend I was in a studio because that must have appealed
to me. I very much wanted to be a singer but I suppressed that because
I came from this academic family where you didn't become a singer. My
mother taught English, my father was an architect. The idea of becoming
a musician wasn't frowned upon, it was just unheard of. They expected
to me to do something in an academic field.
MJ: Do you regret not finishing your Masters degree?
STACEY KENT: No, not at all because my degree means nothing to me in terms
of 'Do I have a BA? Do I have a Masters? Do I have a Ph.D.? Who cares?'
At the time they seemed very important but once you get older you realise
- what does it matter? In fact I have no regrets because I'm so thrilled
that I studied what I studied because I think it made me a stronger performer.
I'm not as good a musician as I could have been had I studied music all
the way, so there are certain regrets in that. But we all have to give
ourselves a break in a way because there's so much to do out there and
we can't do it all.
MJ: Do you still wake up and think "My God I can't believe this has happened
to me?"
STACEY KENT: I'm definitely not at the point - and I hope I never get
to that point - of being blasé about it because I don't want to be complacent
about where I am. It really touches me that I'll go to work at night and
people will come up to me afterwards for an autograph and say "I had a
really bad week and you just made me feel so good" or "I had a terrible
day and I'm going home smiling."
MJ: You are highly praised for managing to attract a following of younger,
non-jazz loving fans, which is quite unusual today. What is it about your
music that gains you this type of audience?
STACEY KENT: I think there is something very infectious that goes on between
us as the musicians and the audience. There is a love of the songs and
people do know a lot of the songs but sometimes they don't know them.
Younger people will come up to me after a gig and say, "Did you write
that?" and that really touches me because it means I'm doing my job OK
- I'm telling the story in such a way that it seems like it's my story.
Jazz is such a huge category and I think the kind of stuff we do, of course
it's called jazz today, but it's out of jazz as well. It's more mainstream
in that it's a very accessible music - they're just songs. I mean basically
I'm a song-singer; I happen to play with a jazz combo and I love a jazz
feel. It affects how I sing things and how I phrase things but my interpretation
would be the same I think in terms of how I convey a story whether I was
in pop or folk or jazz. It thrills me that people are loving this music
who don't necessarily know about this kind of music or even like it.
MJ: How are you able to interpret songs so well?
STACEY KENT: I think it just comes out of me because I am truly moved
by the stuff that I pick. I think it's true for any artist that…it's your
responsibility to yourself to find stuff that moves you and I found this
stuff that genuinely does that for me. I find a [song] like Isn't it a
Pity? and I think 'That's such a great story' - people relate to these
things. I often get emails from people who say, "I just met up with my
wife and we heard Isn't it a Pity and we thought, God that's our story."
MJ: Are you always very conscious of the material you choose to perform
and the messages you're conveying in the songs you sing?
STACEY KENT: It's funny, I tend to sing stories with more happy endings
than sad endings. I don't necessarily go out and look for them. We all
sort of gravitate towards something that feels right for us and I think
that I'm a hopeless romantic and I love those stories that have happy
endings.
MJ: Your current album, Dreamsville, is made up mostly of requests from
your fans. Did you feel obliged to devote an album to your listeners?
STACEY KENT: No, but it really felt like such a natural thing to do. People
were writing me so many requests that when it came to preparing the fourth
album it just kind of came to me. I said to Jim, so many people request
albums, and we thought it would be good to make a sort of unofficial request
album. But the thing that I thought was so interesting was that when I
went through the list and counted [the songs] down, most of them are ballads
and I thought that was a telling sign. As much as I think people like
the swingers…the people who were writing to me were mostly people who
wanted those mushy love songs.
MJ: Is there an artist you connect with in the same way your audience
connects with you?
STACEY KENT: The people who inspired me are the people that I felt were
talking to me, like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and Fred Astaire.
And Fred was interesting because Fred didn't have a great voice but the
way he sang was so full of joy, it was so personal. And I think Frank
was such a genius. But I liked those singers who just tell those great
love stories - those kind of pop singers of the fifties - more than I
did the jazz singers, like Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day and Judy Garland.
But then there are jazz singers that I loved too. I think Ella is one
of the greatest creations of all time.
MJ: How do you respond to the critics who say they are tired of hearing
old jazz standards being sung - do you ever feel under pressure to write
your own material?
STACEY KENT: I did to begin with when I was at the Guildhall and people
said [to me] you're not gonna make it if you don't move on. And so [I
had] this worry about searching for material. The more I started to [sing]
I became very focused in myself and what I was doing. I was also getting
acclaim from the fans and a lot of people were saying "Thank God you're
doing this because we want somebody to be singing these songs". If I wake
up tomorrow and I'm compelled to write a story and a good one and it feels
right then I'll do it, but if I don't, I don't worry about it all. There
are some people who are meant to be writers and other people are interpreters.
And actors are performing in Ibsen plays and they don't write [the plays]
themselves. So now I don't even hear that pressure anymore. I met a girl
the other day who didn't know who Ella Fitzgerald was and she came to
one of my concerts and through that she bought an Ella Fitzgerald record.
The fact that somebody's finding out about someone who's dead and gone
and older because they knew me as a contemporary, that's important.
MJ: Did you find it particularly hard work putting together an album of
songs that are ballads?
STACEY KENT: It was easy and maybe it was easy because I expected it to
be so hard. When I finally decided to put the ballads album together,
at first I thought it was a great idea and then I got a little worried.
I thought, 'My God I'm gonna do a whole ballads album - that's a lot of
ballads and they're draining to sing one after the other'. So I talked
to my producer and we decided to take an extra day so that we could have
a little bit more time between songs and it ended up being so easy. There
was so much variety in the songs and the tempo's that suddenly the tempo's
between a slow ballad and a medium ballad seemed huge. Under a Blanket
of Blue turned into this absolute burner on the day [of recording].
MJ: What's next for Stacey Kent?
STACEY KENT: I don't know, we're so absorbed in Dreamsville and the Dreamsville
tour. We're having a lot of fun with this [album], and I'd say this one
more than any other album was such a delight to make. So I guess I'm gonna
do more of this. Go out, sing the songs, tour the world and hope for the
best.
Dreamsville is due for release in March on Candid Records.
This is Melissa James' first contribution to Jazz Weekly. Comments? Email
us.