If you want a fast way to capsize the cool of a hardcore jazz fan, just try mentioning Stacey Kent.
Kent is the New York-raised, London-based singer who over the past five years has become the nearest thing to a UK Norah Jones or Diana Krall. Her airy, girlish tones and softly understated swing shift soft-lights albums by the shedload. Kent performs all over the world (Carnegie Hall included), the jazz-loving Clint Eastwood is one of her higher-profile fans, and if you go to the legendary Blue Note label's home page, you'll find this month's Blue Note debut album Breakfast On The Morning Tram displayed alongside half a century's worth of classy divas such as Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan, Suzanne Vega and Julie London.
So if Kent's now working for the company that captured classics by everyone from Thelonious Monk to Sonny Rollins as well as all those singing stars, what's the hardcore jazzbo problem?
Well, the implications of the famous phrase "close enough for jazz" gets somewhere near it. On that theory, jazz is supposed to have rough edges and spring surprises (maybe sometimes even uncomfortable ones) on its listeners and its on-the-wing practitioners alike. That's why the phrase "smooth jazz" is regarded as such a risible contradiction in terms in some quarters.
Kent's music, on the other hand, is immaculately polished, rarely raises its emotional temperature, and sometimes sounds as if it could be part of an interior designer's plan for an upmarket apartment, rather than an improvising musician's spontaneous creation, maybe honed in an after-hours bar. Yet, on a close listen, Kent is a highly intelligent and musical performer, whose low-key approach is deceptive, and whose timing and subtle shading are deeply rooted in the fundamentals of jazz. The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, lyric writer of four tunes on the new CD Blue Note debut, has written that "she conveys the sense of a person talking to herself; the faltering hesitancies, the exuberant rushes of inner thought".
I once asked Kent's husband and sax-player Jim Tomlinson if this generally mild-mannered couple ever got miffed by claims they were too safe and smooth to be considered jazzers, or even that their work was a marketing ploy to catch the kind of mainstream listener (and there are a great many) who wants jazz to be like a pinch of spice in a meal, but not the real ingredient.
"Maybe it's thought that if something sounds easy or elegant or unruffled, not discordant or angry-sounding," Tomlinson reflected, "that there's an absence of risk-taking or emotional depth. But to me it can be like comparing a Jackson Pollock painting with a piece of Chinese art - where the Chinese piece might just be a painting of a branch and acres of white space. Who's taking the greater risks? If you have what can seem to some jazz listeners as the outrageous audacity to try to sound simple and beautiful, does that mean you aren't taking any risks? You're setting a bar high for yourself, you have to do it again and again."
That has been a hot issue in jazz conversations for decades and it remains one. The calls for encores (last time she was at Ronnie's, dewy-eyed Friday-night revellers were helplessly shouting "you're beautiful") undoubtedly drown those grumbles out for the likeable Kent and Tomlinson. If their ilk determined the agenda, though, it's hard not to conclude that music's evolution would be a pretty slow-moving business.
