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Artist: Stacey Kent

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Stacey Kent:

Breakfast On The Morning Tram

Blue Note France has signed the London-based American jazz singer Stacey Kent to an exclusive worldwide recording deal. Her Blue Note debut, Breakfast on the Morning Tram, which is a charming mix of standards, pop covers, French chansons, and original songs, will be released in the U.S. on October 2. The album was produced by Kent's husband, tenor saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, whose latest album The Lyric featured Kent's vocals, and won Best Album at the 2006 BBC Jazz Awards.

"Blue Note is the label that just feels right," says Kent. "It's the label I dreamed of as a kid. Signing with Blue Note, I feel like Steffi Graf must have felt the first time she stepped onto court to play Martina Navratilova. I've always had enormous respect for Blue Note and for the artists on the label. So many personalities and different ways of expressing music and always with such integrity and soul. To be part of this family and history is a dream come true."

Breakfast on the Morning Tram marks Kent's return to the studio after a four-year recording hiatus. The album's title refers to the start of something new; a journey in a new direction, and takes its name from one of four new original songs-the first originals that Kent has ever recorded-that were written especially for her by Tomlinson and acclaimed author Kazuo Ishiguro, a winner of the Booker and Whitbread prizes for such literary works as The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.

Kent's association with Ishiguro began in 2002 when he named her recording of "They Can't Take That Away From Me" from the album Let Yourself Go as one of his choices on the BBC Radio show Desert Island Classics. Subsequently, he wrote the liner notes for Kent's album In Love Again. Ishiguro's understanding of her art gave her the idea that he would be the ideal lyricist for her and thus, along with Tomlinson, they began collaborating on songs for her debut Blue Note debut including "The Ice Hotel," "I Wish I Could Go Travelling Again," "So Romantic," and the title track.

Stacey Kent:

I Know I Dream

With over 2 million albums sold, a Grammy nomination and international recognition as one of the most successful and prolific jazz vocalist of her time, Stacey Kent stands strong among the artists that don't have much left to prove. Kent's brand new album, I Know I Dream, was recorded inside the famous Angel Studios in London with an orchestra of around 60 musicians, her first orchestral album in a career that spans two decades and more than 15 albums. So when Sony and OKeh asked her about making an album with a big orchestra, she felt this was the moment: "It's not every day that you get a call about a project with 58 musicians! Nowadays everyone tries to be reasonable but Sony had a real artistic vision".

Stacey Kent:

Tenderly

Stacey Kent – for whom jazz and the "Great American Songbook" formed the musical wallpaper of her East Coast adolescence – viewed Brazilian music with much the same fascination as that with which Menescal had viewed American jazz a generation earlier. Each went on to become an important figure in their own musical sphere. Roberto Menescal began his musical journey in the 1950s as a student in Rio de Janeiro. As an admirer of the exotic sounds of American jazz and popular song, one of his early idols was the jazz guitarist Barney Kessel.