Gen Z bewitched by Laufey’s new jazz age

Laufey talks about introducing the Great American Songbook to a whole new audience and blowing up Tik-Tok along the way.

Icelandic-Chinese musician Laufey. Picture: Instagram

In July, a line of late teens and early 20-somethings, predominantly Asian and female, snaked along the street from a basement venue in London Bridge called Omeara. They were waiting for a concert by Laufey, an Icelandic-Chinese 24-year-old who has blown up TikTok, been lauded by Billie Eilish, Willow Smith and Korean boy band BTS, and done a star turn on US talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

It isn’t surprising, then, that the Omeara show sold out in under a minute – except Laufey isn’t a pop star in the usual sense. She is a cellist, a pianist and a jazz vocalist in the Ella Fitzgerald tradition, and inspiring a surprising revival of interest among Gen Z in the kind of music that belonged to their great-grandparents’ generation.

Among Laufey’s tales of unrequited love and hopeless longing performed at Omeara, all delivered in a sonorous alto and with the singer exuding chaste innocence, was a version of Erroll Garner’s Misty.

It was the only song the entire audience did not sing along to. You can’t blame them. It was a hit for Johnny Mathis in 1959. Then Laufey’s identical twin sister, Junia, joined her on violin for a tale of jealousy called From the Start and the participation started up again, accompanied by a sea of raised iPhones.

“A friend sent me photos of the kids sitting on the street before the Omeara concert,” Laufey (pronounced Lay-Vay) Lin Jonsdottir says, speaking on Zoom from her apartment in Los Angeles, where she moved two years ago.

“A bunch of them were doing their homework. It made me realise that with this current audience, genre doesn’t matter any more. They care about relating to the singer and the song, not the era the music is associated with.”

How did such a resolutely traditional singer come to resonate with such a young fanbase? “At first it was through social media,” she says. “It was during the pandemic, when I couldn’t play live or work with other musicians, that I realised Gen Z didn’t have their own jazz singer, so I set a goal to bring the Great American Songbook to my generation. In 2020 I recorded a song called Street by Street and it took off, probably because there were a lot of people stuck at home with nothing better to do than look at a video of some girl singing and playing cello. So I became a jazz artist for a pop audience.”

What is striking about Laufey’s second album, Bewitched, which flits between gentle bossa nova, vocal jazz and sweeping strings courtesy of the Philharmonia Orchestra, is how much these classic forms are used to couch modern concerns. The lyrics deal with the kinds of themes Taylor Swift has built her career on: bad dates, unfaithful boyfriends, growing pains. One poignant ballad, Letter to My 13-Year-Old Self, is classic alienation material: it is about Laufey feeling awkward as a studious Asian girl, adrift among the frequently tall, frequently blond people of Iceland.

“The songs from the Great American Songbook are by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter: men, writing for musicals,” Laufey says. “I’m taking inspiration from the way they conveyed their point so succinctly in the casual language of the day, but the difference is that my songs come through the eyes of a young girl. I’m writing about seeing someone you like on the Tube, or feeling you don’t fit in at school, which I’m not sure Gershwin would have written about.”

Laufey grew up as, by her own admission, “a total goody-two-shoes”, not least because her mother, a violinist for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, got her and Junia steeped in music from the age of four.

“In the early years it was an extension of school: go to maths, go to English, do an hour of piano and then an hour of cello, no questions asked,” she remembers. “I didn’t love practising, but our mother was strict with us and I’m glad she was because, when we hit 14, she said, ‘I’ve done my job. If you want to continue, it is up to you’.”

None of this made life easy. “I felt odd being so immersed in classical music, never having play dates with kids after school,” she says. “On top of that I am half Chinese and Iceland is a homogenous place, so I already stuck out like a sore thumb. When I started doing singing competitions, I was always described as the 14-year-old with the old woman’s voice, which is not what you want to hear.”

Then Laufey landed a scholarship for Berklee College of Music in Boston, the US centre for jazz and contemporary music. “I was 19 and, until then, I had been sharing a bedroom with my sister, so it felt like I had half of myself ripped out. In high school I never went to parties, never drank, never had boyfriends, and then I got to Berklee and started being a young woman for the first time. Normally I would tell my sister about it, but she wasn’t there so I wrote songs instead.”

Young life experiences have shaped Bewitched. A languorous piano ballad called California and Me tells the familiar tale of a boyfriend running back to an old girlfriend. “They’re all personal anecdotes in some way or another,” Laufey says. “Now I’m touring a lot, which makes dating difficult; so that has gone into the songs too.”

Nonetheless, touring the world – her biggest audience is in China – means Laufey is achieving her dream. “In classical music everything leads up to the performance,” she says. “And wherever I play in the world I see a similar audience to the one at Omeara, so it does seem to be connecting with young people. Whatever happens, I never want to lose sight of my goal of keeping the traditions of this music alive. But in a new way.”

The Times