Laufey/Photo: Gemma Warren
Laufey has taken the jazz world by storm. Whether in London, Berlin, Sydney or Chicago, her concerts sell out within hours at prices averaging $250 a ticket. Thousands of fans, usually women in their early twenties, flock to her shows and shout out every lyric to every song, drawing comparisons to Taylor Swift. Her breakout single, the bossa nova-inspired “From the Start,” is a massive hit. According to music-data provider Luminate, the song has had 313.1 million combined official global streams, and Billboard reports that she has twenty-four million monthly listeners on Spotify. This was followed up by the release of her album “Bewitched,” which was the biggest debut for a jazz album in Spotify history. It also reached number one on Billboard’s Current Traditional Jazz Albums chart and number one on Billboard’s Independent Albums chart. To top off a more than remarkable 2023, Laufey won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, (“Bewitched”) edging out such musical icons as Bruce Springsteen and Rickie Lee Jones.
Yet Laufey did not achieve this success via the usual jazz path of paying your dues through gigs in clubs, backing up a veteran artist, or through a record company’s promotion machine. Instead she blazed this path through self-promotion on social media, gaining 2.2 million followers on Instagram and 3.2 million on TikTok and producing her first EP. There is no argument that these numbers make Laufey more than just an artist, but a mini-phenomenon as well. Where opinions do differ, however, is whether Laufey is considered a jazz performer.
When one thinks of traditional jazz, images of a trumpeter in New Orleans, a woman singing into an RCA microphone, or a quartet jamming under a neon sign could come to mind. Drink in hand, cigarettes dangling from their lips, their faces show age beyond their years. Laufey defies these clichés.
Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir was born in 1999 in Reykjavik. Her father is Icelandic and her mother Chinese. Both her mother and grandfather were classical violinists in China, and her early goal was to play cello in an orchestra. She achieved it by the age of fifteen. Laufey was awarded a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music. During lockdown, she began writing and recording songs in her dorm and releasing them on social media. Her breakout single was a rendition of “I Wish You Love,” an extremely romantic 1945 ballad written by French composer Charles Trenet. It has been a standard for singers like Keely Smith, Frank Sinatra and Marlene Dietrich, as well as Chet Baker, who she cites as her major influence. Laufey’s version is simple and straightforward. With no outside promotion, it was downloaded 100,000 times.
She followed this with her original composition, “From the Start,” a bossa nova number straight out of the Jobim-Gilberto handbook. It is another simple arrangement, featuring Laufey’s classical guitar and cello, her twin sister on violin, brush drumming and piano fills. The lyrics are romantic in an innocent way, pining as her love talks about another “she’s so perfect blah blah blah” and “that when I talk to you, oh Cupid runs right through… and shoots an arrow through my heart.” The video for the song is also extremely low-key, no jump-cuts or montage of images. Instead Laufey, dressed in what looks like an Asian schoolgirl uniform, sings as she walks through a succession of geometrically unique rooms.
Her latest single, “Bewitched,” follows a similar formula. Romantic lyrics accompanied by light strings and orchestration, (all performed by the twin sisters) and a straightforward video of her and a handsome young man, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. Like “I Wish You Love,” the orchestration and vocal take more than a page out of the Great American Songbook and the popular music of the 1940s and pre-rock fifties, now referred to as mid-century pop.
In this way she draws comparisons to Michael Bublé or Norah Jones, but her reach is far greater. Like Jones, for the purpose of her sales and downloads, she is classified as jazz and she singlehandedly outsells pretty much all other jazz artists combined. For this she has earned the praise of many young bloggers and YouTubers as “saving jazz.” This, of course, raised controversy in the traditional jazz world.
Adam Neely of the fusion band Sungazer put out a lengthy video on this topic, stating how Laufey has, unlike other young jazz-influenced artists like Samara Joy and Esmeralda Spaulding, little or no hints of blues or other African American influences in her music. Laufey’s image and persona also defy jazz tradition. Besides jazz artists like Baker, she mentions Swift and Billie Eilish as major influences. She dresses in almost preppy-style clothing and admits that until a few months ago had never been to a jazz club, stating on ‘The Zack Sang Show,” “They [jazz clubs] are scary places to enter into. It’s like this big room and you don’t know how to dress, when to clap… If you have to be eighteen, twenty-one?”
This has sparked a long thread of opinions and counter opinions on jazz blogs, Reddit and more YouTube videos than can fill a phone screen. Her music does lack some of the raw emotion and intensity of bebop and eschews the long periods of improvised solos. But Laufey’s talent and overall approach suck the oxygen away from these brushfires. Laufey’s music is real. She plays three instruments: cello, piano and guitar. The chord chart on “From the Start” is a maze of Cb7#5 and Ab13 chords that pop, country and rock musicians avoid like active volcanos. While singing, she scats and uses her voice to voice run-through chromatic scales; and employing diminished harmonies, vocal techniques that were used by master jazz vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Baker. And for those jazz gatekeepers, the world has changed. Today’s performing jazz musicians come from across the spectrum, many are graduates of university jazz programs, and have been influenced by rock, classical and avant-garde music as well as bebop and big bands. Preferring preppy clothes and carrying herself in a quiet, understated manner, Laufey may not fit the traditional image of a jazz musician. But her instrumental and vocal talent, as well as millions of social media followers, and now a Grammy Award on her shelf, are bringing in a new generation of fans. Some of them may even Google Chet Baker.
Laufey will be performing at the Chicago Theatre, 175 North State on April 28, 8pm. First-market tickets are sold out.
