In the 1990s, she began her professional career singing at Café Bohème in London's Soho. After two or three years, she began opening for established acts at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London. Her first album, Close Your Eyes, was released in 1997. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the liner notes to Kent's 2003 album, In Love Again. Ishiguro met Kent after he chose her recording of "They Can't Take That Away from Me" as one of his Desert Island Discs in 2002, and Kent asked Tomlinson and Ishiguro to write for her. Ishiguro has said of his lyric writing that "with an intimate, confiding, first-person song, the meaning must not be self-sufficient on the page. It has to be oblique, sometimes you have to read between the lines" and that this realization has had an "enormous influence" on his fiction writing. Tomlinson and Ishiguro co-wrote four songs on the album Breakfast on the Morning Tram. The first of their songs, "The Ice Hotel", won first prize in the International Songwriting Competition in April 2008. Kent recorded several more Tomlinson/Ishiguro songs on Dreamer In Concert, The Changing Lights, and .
Popular success
Kent's album The Boy Next Door achieved Gold album status in France in September 2006. Breakfast on the Morning Tram achieved Platinum album status in France in November 2007 and Double Gold status in Germany in February 2008. Raconte-moi... was recorded in French and achieved Gold status in both France and Germany and became the second best selling French language album worldwide in 2010. Dreamer In Concert was recorded in May, 2011, at La Cigale in Paris. The album includes three songs previously unrecorded by Kent: "Waters of March" by Antonio Carlos Jobim, "Postcard Lovers" by Jim Tomlinson with lyrics by Kazuo Ishiguro, and "O Comboio" by Portuguese poet António Ladeira. In 2013, Kent released The Changing Lights, a Brazilian-tinged album, covering bossa nova classics such as Jobim's "How Insensitive" and again collaborating with Tomlinson and Ishiguro. In 2014, she left Warner Bros. and signed with Sony. Sony released Tenderly, an album of standards with Roberto Menescal, one of the founders of bossa nova. She met Menescal in Brazil in 2011 at the 80th birthday celebration of the Christ the Redeemer statue. They discovered they were fans of each others' work and collaborated on an album of standards inspired by Menescal's admiration for the duo of Julie London and Barney Kessel. In 2014, Marcos Valle invited her to tour in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his career. They recorded the album Ao Vivo and a DVD that was recorded live at the Birdland club in New York City and the Blue Note in Tokyo. In 2017, Kent recorded her next album for Sony, , her first album with an orchestra, comprising 58 musicians with arrangements by Tommy Laurence, with music from the Great American Songbook, French chansons, songs by Edu Lobo, Jobim, Tomlinson, Ishiguro, Ladeira and his songwriting partner Cliff Goldmacher from Nashville. Tomlinson and Goldmacher wrote the title song.
