A Poem to Macau, by Nobel Prize author Kazuo Ishiguro

Acclaimed author Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the lyrics, saxophonist Jim Tomlinson composed the music, and jazz singer Stacey Kent provided the voice. Tango in Macao will now be presented at The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival.

 

 

The year was 2002. Kazuo Ishiguro, a British writer born in Nagasaki in the post-war period, was being interviewed on a BBC radio channel and Stacey Kent was listening attentively at home. Ishiguro had won the Booker Prize years earlier for The Remains of the Day, and was by then one of Stacey’s most beloved writers. The programme she was listening to was Desert Island Discs, also one of her favourites. Like other guests before him – writers, actors, athletes, politicians and other celebrities – Ishiguro was in studio to talk about which CDs he would take to a desert island if he had to stay there for good. 

 

After naming the likes of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, Ishiguro explained that he couldn’t do without pre-rock & roll American popular music, and that his favourite record in this musical genre was a version of George Gershwin’s They Can't Take That Away from Me, recorded by Stacey Kent on a Fred Astaire tribute album.

 

“I was absolutely overwhelmed,” recalls the American singer, who at the time still had a relatively low-key career in the music world; the awards and Grammy nominations would come later. “I had never met him, but I was a big fan of his work. There are great writers who you admire for their prose and ideas. Then there are the writers with whom you feel a special relationship. Writers from whom you read a few lines, a few paragraphs, a few chapters, and say: 'Yes, that’s exactly how I see the world'. Ishiguro was, for me, one of those authors who really expressed things I felt myself, with whom I had a shared sensibility, even though I didn’t know him then.” 

 

 

 

 

Stacey was so thrilled to realise that a record of hers might be sitting on the table where Ishiguro wrote his novels, that she decided to write him a letter thanking him for the reference on the BBC programme. The response was almost immediate. Ishiguro would later confess to having also experienced a special connection when hearing Stacey for the very first time. 

 

“Her approach as a singer is similar to my approach as a writer,” he justifies. “When I hear her sing, I feel she captures a sense of internality.” 

 

The friendship between them began to grow right then and there, and quickly extended to Ishiguro’s wife, Lorna MacDougall, and Stacey’s husband, Jim Tomlinson. But it would take a few more years before the working relationship that still exists today was born.

 

“The four of us were having lunch and discussing the album we were planning to record the following year for Blue Note, talking about our wishes, the kind of compositions, the stories we wanted to tell, even Joni Mitchell’s music, when someone said – I think it was Jim – that Ish (as Kazuo Ishiguro is affectionately called by his friends) should write a song for me”, recalls the singer to Macau CLOSER, without being able to mention the exact date (2006 we found out later). “And Ish replied, 'Oh my God, you’re right!' And suddenly we were already talking about the language of the songs we were going to do together and their themes. It was a really fast and intense turn of events”.

 

It was time now to turn words into actions. Words into music. 

 

“We decided that the most practical way would be for us to start with the lyrics, because we wanted Ishiguro to just go write something without being bound by musical structures, let alone the usual standard jazz structures,” Stacey says, before evoking a moment she will never forget. “Two weeks after that lunch, I was in my pyjamas on the doorstep, where the mail drops, when the first envelope arrived. I opened it and read Ice Hotel and Breakfast in the Morning Tram for the first time. The sensation was indescribable, overwhelming. The texts were magnificent, they were amazing. I called Jim and read them aloud. And we decided that’s what we would do in the future: I would record the lyrics on a tape recorder, reading them aloud, and he would use that recording to write and develop the melodies. That’s what makes these songs so personal: they were tailor-made to fit the way in which I would express a lyrical story.”

 

That’s how the first two songs were composed, and that’s how all others subsequently have also happened. 

 

“Ish sends the lyrics, I read and record them aloud, Jim disappears into a studio for a while and comes up with these songs,” Stacey amusedly recounts. “After the first two, came I Wish I Could Go Travelling Again, which I’ve just recorded again; Bullet Train; The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain; The Changing Lights; Waiter, Oh Waiter; Postcard Lovers – all astounding stories.”

 

Invariably, the lyrics of the songs reminded Stacey of novels previously published by Ishiguro. “That’s the comic side of it,” says the singer. “Waiter, Oh Waiter immediately reminded me of Steven, the butler in The Remains of the Day. It’s as if he (Ishiguro) borrows from his own themes and reinvents them for the songs. It's all this that explains why our relationship is still going strong today.” 

 

 

 

 

 

“Tango in Macao is one of those songs that I had sitting on my piano for a long time,” Jim Tomlinson joins in the conversation. “I’ve worked on it a few times over the years, but never sort of got close to completing it. It was only when the pandemic came that I found myself with time to give it the kind of attention it deserved.”

 

The lyrics had something quite common in those written by Ishiguro to Stacey: a strange, enigmatic juxtaposition, that takes people into “some sort of surreal scenario”, Tomlinson describes. “In Breakfast in the Morning Tram, the idea of having breakfast in a tram is quite odd. The same is true with Tango in Macao. Tango is, of course, an Argentinian dance form. There is a pair of lovers and one promises the other a tango. But it’s not a tango in Buenos Aires. And it’s not just tango; it’s tango in Macau. So even just from the title, you kind of get the sense of strangeness and exoticism, which makes us think: ‘Why tango? And why Macau’?”

 

Stacey will eventually come up with a reason for this. But first, her husband confesses that the enigmatic side of the lyrics was “very stimulating from a song-writing point of view”. That and the freedom Ishiguro allowed him to enjoy while composing: “You know, it’s called Tango, but it doesn’t have to be a tango,” the musician heard from the writer. “That sort of unlocked it for me. Although the main verse of the song is kind of a tango, it goes then into a Viennese waltz. And I think that those musical changes of character reflect the song’s protagonist’s indecision about precisely how to resolve the situation she finds herself in.”

 

Stacey takes this same song as an example to highlight the extremely visual side of Ishiguro’s lyrics. “There are so many images that are powerful! The experience of singing them is so cinematic! And those strange juxtapositions that Jim refers to, that seem to crop up over and over again, that’s very much his technique.”

 

 

 

Although Ishiguro had mentioned Macau in one of his books (“the detective wanders into the frontline of Japan’s invading army, while Sarah waits to run away with him to Macao”, from the novel When We Were Orphans), the writer is not reported to have ever been here before. According to Stacey, when writing Tango in Macao, the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, was apparently inspired by the 1952 film Macao, starring Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum.

 

“As fans of his books, we all know that the essence of what he wants to say and express doesn’t necessarily have to be found in the setting he chooses for his themes. There is a launching pad, but it can be purely metaphorical, a way just for a good story,” she explains. “I think the only reason he wrote Tango in Macao was that for some time we were all going through a noir features film series. Jim and I, Ish and Lorna tend to watch movies sometimes in solo pieces, but we also go into our own little film festivals, where we watched a lot of Satyajit Ray, Renoir, Powell and Pressburger, and other movies. And we were talking about it on the phone one day, and he happened to be watching the movie Macao. That doesn’t mean that he immediately thought he had to write something about Macau, but it must have been in the forefront of his mind – and so when he sat down to write a lyric, that’s what came out”. 

 

It has not been possible to confirm this version of events with the writer, who is currently involved in the filming of a movie based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru, with his own screenplay. But one knows for certain that Ishiguro wrote Tango in Macao right after Stacey Kent performed for the first time in the Macau SAR; a concert at the Macau Cultural Centre in September 2006 of which she has fond memories, though not necessarily linked to the performance itself.

 

“It was September 9, Jim’s birthday, and they gave us some posters from an exhibition they had there, Breath of the Universe (traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting works), which we liked so much that we ended up bringing two of them home to frame. We look at them all the time. So, Macau has stayed very close to our hearts”.

 

 

Stacey and Jim returned to Macau in 2014 for a concert marking the re-opening of the Venetian Theatre after the Cirque du Soleil show ZAIA, left the stage. If possible, they are hoping to return here next year as part of an Asian tour.

 

“We have recorded Tango in Macao and yesterday I sang it live for the first time, now that I have been able to resume concerts, with a tour of the UK, France and the United States,” reveals the singer, on her way to America. Her Asian tour will be in the autumn and Stacey claims that performing in Macau, playing Tango in Macao here, has now become imperious: “Are you kidding? We can’t wait to do that. What fun! I hope we will finally get to bring it to its home, in Macau”. 

 

For jazz critics who have already heard Tango in Macao, “there is a certain paradox, if not irony at play on an album where covers are a theme, that the best song is an original that you won't have heard before”. Songs From Other Places is the name of the album. And Stacey Kent is preparing to sing it live in the coming weeks.

 

“Tango In Macao kidnaps your ears and sounds like an instant classic already”, claims one of those jazz critics. Macau audiences will be able to make their own assessment soon, at The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival.