If you've spent even a little time in TikTok, you might have come across Laufey Lin, an Icelandic singer-songwriter massively known in the online space for her heartwrenching songs that are jazz-inspired like "Let You Break My Heart Again."
Laufey's success is undeniable, with her second album, "Bewitched," sitting at the No. 1 spot in Billboard's Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums charts for over eight weeks now since reaching the top in September.
This recent success can be attributed to the popularity of the album's lead single, "From The Start," which currently has a massive 163 million streams on Spotify, and her prior songs are following suit in terms of ranking. All of this cements her popularity in the younger generation.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 28: Laufey attends The Drop: Laufey at The GRAMMY Museum on September 28, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.
Gen Z's Notion on Laufey and Jazz
In a 2022 interview with TODAY, Laufey talked about how she nurtured this love for jazz in her community, which comprised mainly of Gen Z. According to the artist, the primary reason she started working on her songs was to reach "younger audiences" by reframing jazz for her fellow Gen Z.
Sufficed to say, all of the accomplishments of the 23-year-old singer-songwriter prompted a vocal Gen Z fanbase, "inducting" her as the generation's jazz icon and ranking her shoulder-to-shoulder with legends such as Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, and her idol, John Coltrane.
However, there is an even more vocal minority that would say otherwise when it comes to calling Laufey a jazz artist, let alone a jazz legend in the making.
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Against Laufey's Jazz Identity
Adam Neely, a jazz-centric YouTuber with a sizeable 1.7 million subscriber count, is one of the critics who push back on the notion that Laufey is a jazz artist.
In his video called "Is Laufey Jazz?" he goes point by point to categorize Laufey's sound. Adam noted that Laufey's music is only jazz-inspired, and she is actually more in line with musical theater and early pop music.
His argument is rooted in the definition set by Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of jazz at Lincoln Center, for the genre. The definition sets limited criteria for what can be called jazz, with an emphasis on calling these criteria as things that are "classical" in the genre.
Basically, for Marsalis, there are two important signifiers: the compositions of major writers and the quality of improvisation.
Yes, Laufey Is Jazz
There lies the problem in Adam's argument as he tries to evaluate Laufey as a jazz artist in the traditional sense. She herself said how she "reframed jazz for her fellow Gen Z," and looking at her through this limiting perspective is unfair.
In the same way, Johann Sebastian Bach is more accurately a Baroque-era composer, and Claude Debussy a Romantic-era composer, but both are considered classical musicians because the genre has evolved into a bigger umbrella term. Besides, they are similar enough in sound identity.
Laufey's brand of jazz might be different from Coltrane's, but at the end of the day, it's still similar enough in structure and contains elements that made jazz popular, such as dissonance and spicy 7th and 9th chords.
Whatever the case may be, what is important is that Laufey is still doing a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to bridging the younger generation's attention to jazz, thus bringing all the welcome love they can give to this beautiful genre.
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