Album Notes

Kristine Stott has been singing since the age of two, when her father taped her rendition of “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” Born into a musical and theatrical family, she made her stage debut at age eight in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and hasn’t looked back since. Early training in music and drama reinforced her ambition to become a classical actress, but somehow she seemed to win role after role in musical comedies. Urged into the world of opera in her 20s, she studied singing in New York and London, and emerged as a lyric coloratura mezzo-soprano. She has performed with regional theatre and opera companies throughout the U.S. and Europe, with roles in works ranging from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte and Offenbach’s La Perichole to A Little Night Music and Annie Get Your Gun. Equally at home on the concert stage and cabaret hall, she loves to sing standards as well as new music. She has performed a number of world premieres, including Blue Vagabond by Stephen Scotti, with whom she has been collaborating artistically since 1997.

Composer and cabaret performer Stephen Scotti earned a degree in music theory from Boston University, specializing in classical piano and Gregorian chant. He financed his musical education by setting customers’ poems to original music for a dollar per song, sometimes earning as much as $90 per week. When this proved insufficient, he found employment playing piano in the burlesque houses in Scollay Square in the 1960s, where he acquired the habit of playing in white gloves—due not to excessive artistic sensitivity, but to the unsanitary keyboards on which he had to play. It was during this period that he discovered the poetry of e.e. cummings and was inspired to compose his first major work, Viva Cummings!, which has been performed in New York and Boston and which was chosen to represent the United States in the International Musical Theatre Festival in Venezuela in 1995. Settings of poetry by William Butler Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, Dorothy Parker, and others have followed, and Scotti has performed his songs in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and Germany. His fascination with the written word has reached full expression in some of the songs included in this album.