JAZZ REVIEW: Stacey's silken soirée

Popular jazz singer Stacey Kent was telling her Hove audience about her new songwriting team. It amounted to a warning.

Her saxophonist husband Jim Tomlinson and author Kazuo Ishiguro hardly needed an embryonic stage in their partnership '” they seemed born to it. But those two men had no doubt they were writing for a woman whose distinctively special artistry had already given her possession of an supreme ability to break and mend hearts.

She probably does it every time she performs because, not only are her songs charged with romantic observation and feeling, but they come in a gossamer packaging. Her voice has a magnetic lightness of being.

And behind the translucently soft, silky, purring way in which she tells her so-often narrative songs, there is always a subtly understated tearing in the guts. Then comes a tune, a rhythm and a lyric that makes it all better again.