The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro describes her as "a singer to match the greats of the past, with an unusual power to hold your attention and control your emotions from the first note".

Ian McKellen cast her as a Thirties singer in his updated version of Richard III, performing a pastiche based on a Marlowe sonnet. When crime writer John Harvey had his detective Charlie Resnick visit a fictional jazz club, it was Stacey Kent he chose to put on the stage.

People with a fascination for words seem to be particularly enamoured of Kent, a jazz singer from New York who met her musical and romantic partner Jim Tomlinson at Oxford University.

Both husband and wife share an interest in "the way music and words entwine" and together sell out concert halls around the world. Last year their fullest collaboration to date, titled The Lyric, won Album of the Year at the 2006 BBC Jazz Awards.

Performing around English jazz clubs in 2000, Kent got her musical break when America's CBS Sunday Morning show broadcast a piece about the young singer.

Astonished CBS executives declared they had never known such a massive reaction to a musical item in the history of the show and the surge in interest was so great that Kent's album, The Tender Trap, shot to number one at amazon.com and number two in the Billboard Charts.

With a style best described as classic chic, Kent went on to make six bestselling albums and collect a string of awards, including the 2002 BBC Jazz Award for best vocalist.

But it is Kent's work with her husband Jim Tomlinson, the elegant tenor saxophonist, which has really caught fans' imaginations. On stage the couple have an intensely romantic connection which has led many to talk in terms of Billie Holiday and Lester Young, and saw one New York Times critic compare the experience to "eavesdropping on intimate pillow talk by besotted partners in a luxury suite atop some faraway pop-jazz Olympus".

Their rare musical empathy is best captured on The Lyric, for which Tomlinson chose the songs - a mixture of standards and swaying sambas.

"Stacey graciously accepted my invitation, indulged me in my choice of material and sang with more joy and abandon than ever before", he says.

"There are no dramatic departures or radical reworkings, no clumsy emoting or overbearing attempts to appropriate the songs. Stacey sings with the voice with which she speaks. Delicately yet indelibly, she stamps her mark on each of them."

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