Laufey performed in Montreal last year and I saw her and listened… cold, with no emotion for these noble and good feelings set to lushy jazzy music. For me, I had seen and heard enough, really not my cup of tea to rehabilitate post-war Anglo-American vamps. But… these considerations were completely unnecessary, as we can see a year later. The Chinese-Icelandic singer’s pop ebullience was already underway, and here we are in 2024, she’s THE superstar in the concert hall at this Montreal International Jazz Festival, the one who sells the most tickets at the highest price.
I invite you to read the respectful review by our collaborator Vitta Morales, in which he reports that Laufey’s audience is super-young and embraces that pop aesthetic of the 40s and 50s: sentimental ballads with strings, bossa nova and other torch songs that their grandparents, then teenagers or young adults, enjoyed at a time when American pop culture was still triumphantly dependent on jazz. Then came the 60s and 70s, the counter-culture, rock, electric jazz… and these velvety melodies met with disapproval from all quarters, starting with jazzophiles, who considered this pop approach corny, old-fashioned, dead and buried.
Time passed, passed, passed and… surprise in 2024.
Of course, the cultural breaks happen generally without nuance, as the generations that succeeded the heyday of jazzy, orchestral pop had forgotten the quality of the arrangements, the harmonic richness, the lascivious, elegant expressiveness, that expression of the ups and downs of sentimental life.
No less than 8 decades later, Laufey takes up those satiny forms again, and millions of young people, mostly female, go wild. Broadcasters on all the world’s major stages are rubbing their hands, as few female singers associated with jazz are capable of such mass impact.
The jazz business, which has been in a state of disrepair since the turn of the century, regularly tries to launch another Diana Krall, without succeeding in overflowing the market with dying nostalgia… since the absolute majority of fans of the genre who lived through that era are no longer with us or unable to attend a concert hall. And then there’s this resurrection of a genre long considered obsolete.
The Laufey phenomenon is not unique. Social media, especially TikTok in this case, are contributing to the exponential unearthing, revival and classicization of musical forms from the distant past. Neoclassicism feeds on it with the results we all know, and now neojazz is doing the same. What more is there to say?
