Love Is...The Tender Trap [Audio CD] KENT,STACEY

With the passing years the definition "jazz singer" has taken on wider meaning. Purists once maintained that it covered only the vocals of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and a handful of others. Nowadays it quite legitimately refers to a host of fine singers whose musicianship allows them to take liberties with the relationship of notes to bar lines and the "bending" of a lyric to fit a paraphrase of the melody as written. Stacey Kent, a young American lady resident in Britain, is a jazz singer and responds to the jazz musicians with whom she works and to the material that she uses. The Tender Trap is made up of a dozen quality songs of the kind that jazz musicians like to play. On eight of them her husband Jim Tomlinson, a tenor saxist of considerable talent, joins her. Stacey Kent is not afraid to tackle difficult songs which started life as instrumentals (Edgar Sampson's "Don't Be That Way" and Duke Ellington's "I Didn't Know About You"). For quiet intimacy there is an outstanding version of "Wee Small Hours" on which she is accompanied only by pianist Dave Newton. An outstanding record of vocal artistry. --Steve Voce