An Evening with Kazuo Ishiguro & Stacey Kent at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

By londonjazz on 31 March 2024 • ( 1 Comment )

An Evening with Kazuo Ishiguro & Stacey Kent
(Queen Elizabeth Hall. 30 March 2024. Review by Dominique Jackson)

The QEH stage. Image by Bianca Bagnarelli. Photo credit Ted Hodgkinson (*)

“What should a modern day jazz song look like?” was the conundrum Kazuo Ishiguro had to wrestle when Stacey Kent first asked him to pen some original lyrics.

The genial Nobel and Booker laureate confessed his initial trepidation as he introduced a triumphant and utterly unique evening of crossover and collaboration with the acclaimed American-born singer, who delivered a polished, yet relaxed, set of songs by ‘Ish’ and Kent’s husband, Jim Tomlinson. The trio was completed by the masterful Art Hirahara on piano and keyboards.

The Nagasaki-born, British writer talked warmly about his collaboration with the couple, which began back in 2002, after Ishiguro selected one of Stacey’s tracks for his Desert Island Discs appearance on BBC Radio 4.

The Queen Elizabeth Hall event marked the publication, by Faber & Faber, of “The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain”, a handsomely produced volume of the lyrics, accompanied by the striking and sumptuous illustrations of Italian artist, Bianca Bagnarelli. Bagnarelli, an award winning fumettista cartoonist, was also introduced, to enthusiastic applause.

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An exotic, and slightly subversive, tone was instantly conjured by the opening number: “Tango in Macao”, with its evocations of rusty ceiling fans, dark alleys and broken hearted gangsters, set to Tomlinson’s disquieting saxophone and the piano’s meticulous echoing of the Latin dance rhythms.

“Postcard lovers”, next, amplified the nostalgic, overtly cinematic, feel with the deceptively simple interplay of flute and keyboard underlining Ishiguro’s wistful lyrics, contemplating a putative relationship, foiled by both distance and time.

In “Waiter, Oh Waiter”, the lyrics take a decidedly playful turn, with yet another displaced traveller, agonizing over the mysteries of a foreign menu, accompanied by an exuberant bossa nova, nicely balanced between Hirahara and Tomlinson.

Journeys, both temporal and spatial, along with destinations and places, both familiar and far-flung, loom large in these compositions. Often, quite literally, as in “Bullet Train”.

This is another deeply reflective, first person ponder, which seems to contain the bones of an entire Ishiguro novel in a series of deftly drawn vignettes. Bolstering this narrative of “Nowheresville, Japan”, the precise syncopation of Tomlinson’s melodies viscerally recalled the motion of the Shinkansen express, “Tokyo to Nagoya, Nagoya to Berlin”.

Ishiguro himself talked of the challenges of adequately describing these frequently thorny, amorous predicaments, acknowledging that Kent herself had implored him to retain ‘some sliver of hope’ in even the saddest of scenarios.

The second half of the evening opened with a perceptive interview, conducted by broadcaster and journalist, Samira Ahmed, who coaxed a number of beguiling aperçus from the distinguished writer. They debated the nature of collaboration and the distinctions, apparent and covert, between writing words for music and novels or screenplays. For Ishiguro, song lyrics are most definitely not a poem.

In a relaxed and unaffected colloquy, Ish, as his friends all call him, revealed how he often comes up with possible titles by thumbing through cookbooks with his wife, Lorna. The author also acknowledged the major influence on his work of his mixed cultural heritage, growing up Japanese in the very English Home Counties.

For Ish, this was clearly a privileged, almost magical, collaboration and a return, of sorts, to the fevered song writing which, he admitted, marked the start, aged 15, of his own writing career. He credits these early songs, as a kind of ‘delirious, stream of consciousness’ apprenticeship for his later, prize-winning, longer and decidedly ‘less purple, more pared down’ work.

The trio of performers returned to the stage for a valedictory version of “The Ice Hotel”, an early Tomlinson-Ishiguro composition, first recorded in 2007. This was interpreted, with her customarily understated, yet highly emotional intelligence, by Kent. With an enormous, palatial snowscape by Bianca Bagnarelli projected overhead, it made for an eloquent conclusion to a captivating evening.