In ordinary times –and lord knows these are not ordinary times –we could hardly pause long enough for a listen to saxophonist Jim Tomlinson and his jazz singer wife Stacey Kent. Theirs is one of those rare marriages made in music heaven or hell, give or take a few purgatories in between. Tomlinson’s debut album of some years back, Only Trust Your Heart, and Kent’s CD of adaptations of fave songs by male singers, The Boy Next Door, were recently released locally by Candid Records. And while we might as well have been listening to some other CDs of jazz artists, preferably on the now perhaps defunct or seldom heard from ECM label, fact remains that here was Kent and Tomlinson very much available on the battered CD player, skips and troubled starter and warts and all, coming through with a rare musical companionship that is subtle as it is incomparable.
The closest soul brother of Tomlinson when it comes to tone in playing the saxophone, is the late great Stan Getz, who in turn was a bright departure from Paul Desmond of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. There are times when, in between bars, you could almost hear a pin drop –as that aircon commercial of yesteryears goes –so close to closing time is the spirit of Tomlinson’s playing, at least in Only Trust Your Heart.
When wife Stacey comes on in songs like You’re a Lucky So and so, we get an inkling of a partnership founded in music, almost like the sun making its presence felt in the midst of proceedings. Neither can the so-called bit players be taken for granted, as in guitarist Colin Oxley coaxing the chops out of an all too quiet guitar, the instrument more often used for rhythm and bridge purposes in jazz setting. Bass and drums? There they go tiptoeing through the tulips.
One listens to Tomlinson and one is not sure whether the guy’s playing is contemporary or retro, certainly not hard-to-find, save for that blank space between bars that grows with the profundity of each moment and change of key or tempo.
Kent is another matter altogether because she really can, and how. She is in the mold of the great jazz singers, yet not one solely anchored on nostalgia. She half whispers the Bacharach ditty, What the World Needs Now, which rendition would shame Austin Powers because it’s not merely groovy, baby, but verily hits the spot. On the Paul Simon song Old Friends from the Simon and Garfunkel album Bookends, she makes us sit up and take note not only of the years gone by, but how time and its tricks make us so much older then we’re younger than that now.
If for example, someone tells me that years from now I’d still be listening to the same stuff I do as a middle aged man –i.e., dzFE with its religious commentaries of haphazard inspiration, some Gabor Szabo, and this husband and wife tandem of voice and sax marriage –I might laugh out loud or shrug off the crystal ball memo altogether. You never know what the music PRs may send you, whether the CD player can still read the originally pressed ones after playing so many pirated CDs. Or if the car radio would still be functional, with Rexy on the master’s touch playing, of all things, Flight of the Bumble Bee, a staple for Humanities class, and maybe what the world really needs now is love, if not lower crude oil prices.
The Boy Next Door, yeah, that’s an album to get, Kent sounding miles away from what Linda Ronstadt ever hoped to muster. She even has a magnificent version of Chet Baker’s I Get Along Without You Very Well, which is the best in absentia song for the dear departed. But why is it we keep hearing the song Someone to Watch Over Me even if it isn’t on the album, except that our imagination could again be playing a trick on us. Just our imagination running away with us and Smokey Robinson and his miracles.
Which is why it took us so long to write, not knowing what to do or listen to after the CD is reviewed. Each time we put the CD of Kent or Tomlinson or Kent and Tomlinson on, we hear something new everyday.