Laufey and Gen Z Jazz

Disclaimer: This essay was directly inspired by Adam Neely’s video discussing whether or not Laufey is ‘jazz’. While I will also address this topic, this is more a companion piece than a rehashing of his points. I urge you to watch that video first and then return.

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Laufey, as Adam Neely says it, perfectly encapsulates what music is in 2023. She went viral over the pandemic for live-streaming her singing before garnering more than 11.8 million listeners a month on Spotify alone. Her songs are lush with character, but can also be easily enjoyed as a simple guitar cover. She released a sped-up version of her hit song ‘From the Start’, which along with the un-sped-up version has been used in hundreds of thousands of videos across TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter.

Maybe it’s because of these things I feel so strongly drawn to her music.

Of course, Laufey’s music is beautiful. A Night at the Symphony, her 2023 live collaboration album with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra demonstrates not only her incredible voice but also shows off her multi-instrumentalist skills through her cello and guitar playing. Each song on the album is an arrangement of one of her songs, which also speaks to her compositional ability. My favorite song of hers is California and Me, not only because she sings mainly about both my home state and city, but also because her work with the Philharmonia Orchestra exemplifies the music Laufey tries to make- a connection between modern pop, classical, and jazz. In Adam’s video, he talks a lot about what Laufey means to JAZZ the establishment. His main point is that what Laufey makes is not Jazz, despite the use of Jazz vocabulary and vernacular. His eventual conclusion is that Laufey makes mid-century pop music, and draws direct inspiration- whether meaningfully or not- from composers like Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, rather than the jazz musicians who rearranged their music into the standards that we know and love today. However, I am going to approach her music, and in turn my love for it, as a fan of the genre and not as a Jazz historian or Music Theororist, and instead look at her creations through the lens of Gen Z ( and by extension Gen A or even Millennials, although I obviously can’t speak on their experiences).

By many of my friends’ admission, their entire foray into jazz comes from one YouTube stream that has been running on and off since February 2017- Lofi Girl’s “lofi hip hop radio 📚 - beats to relax/study to”. Lofi Girl has accumulated 1.7 billion streams since the creation of their channel, with many coming from this single live stream. This livestream, along with a plethora of other Lofi channels and music creators blew up during the pandemic and offers chill and relaxing often exclusively instrumental music with a footing in Jazz chord structure with hip-hop-inspired drum and synth patterns. In many ways, Lofi Hiphop is not ‘real’ Jazz. Wynton Marsalis would probably have a heart attack if someone told him their favorite jazz musician was a faceless channel with a girl studying. The idea that Lofi Hiphop is jazz is one that is pushed back upon pretty heavily by so-called ‘Jazz Purists’ or people who think that even Herbie Handcock or Chick Corea incorporates too many electric elements to place themselves in the same genre as Miles or Bird. Still, it is undeniable that Lofi hip-hop and similar genres are the most public-facing facets of the modern jazz community.

Jazz, for so many, is looked at like an unreadable monolith, hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone to guide them. It’s not hard to understand why. Even outside of the gatekeeping of those Jazz Purists who keep so many away through their attitude alone, jazz is a genre built upon the shoulders of the giants who came before. There is no Ornette without Miles, there is no Miles without Parker and Dizzy, and there is no Parker and Dizzy without Duke. Of course, that is a massive simplification, but jazz has always built upon itself and other genres in a way that made the continual evolution of the ‘Sound of Jazz’ not only an inevitability but a defining feature of the music. While this is amazing for people who already love and understand what Jazz is to the point of understanding its subversions, a beginner to the genre sees all of this as a mess of complexity, and shies away from diving deeper. It’s not that the styles of bebop were fully supplanted by those of free jazz or that earlier styles within the genre are not being practiced, cherished and loved (One of my favorite ‘modern’ trumpet players is Roy Hargrove, who plays a very classic style of jazz), but the insanely deep and broad history of jazz means that those who don’t or can’t differentiate these things often don’t appreciate what the music is trying to do. I also think that needing to have years of experience, at least a basic understanding of musical theory and knowledge of dozens of subgenres shouldn’t be necessary to enjoy an album of any kind. That's why the intentional denial of Lofi Hiphop and even Laufey to a certain extent by the Jazz mainstream is so hurtful to those of us who grew up around these sounds - it feels like a rejection of us, the Gen Z listener.

In Adam’s video, he talks about how so many publications are calling Laufey the savior of jazz, and that she single-handedly is bringing Jazz back from the brink of erasure by herself. He points to the State of Jazz Spotify playlist, which at the time had the cover of Esperanza Spalding and Fred Hersh’s 2023 record Alive at the Village Vanguard. Both Spalding and Hersh are phenomenal musicians, both pushing the envelope while creating very classic ‘jazz’ album experiences, especially in the aforementioned album. However, together both of them have ~320,000 monthly listeners. If these are the bright, young stars for Gen Z- a generation listening to more music then any generation before them- then these low numbers are an indication of something. Of course, numbers aren’t everything. Laufey’s popularity stems from her very clear base of pop music listeners who like her because of the very pop-centric features that her music features. However, the idea that Jazz isn’t dying because they have young artists like Spalding and Hersh and yet together have 1/36th the audience of Laufey clearly demonstrates a disconnect between young listeners and young jazz music.

What Jazz is cannot be and should not be divorced from its roots in African-Americanism and the inherent experience of oppression that allowed for its creation. However, the incorporation of outside genres into the Jazz tradition is something that has happened multiple times. The most major would be Jazz Fusion, which incorporated heavy Rock elements with the classic instrumentation and vernacular of jazz. This blend not only brought together two very different forms of music but also was one of the first times the ‘white’ mainstream was introduced following the end of the 1942-1944 AFM Recording Artist strike. Miles Davis opening for the Grateful Dead in 1970 right after the release of his seminal fusion album Bitches Brew shows how interwoven these two genres became. Jazz is also inspired by and inspires musicians across the globe. In Japan, for example, jazz was so popular before WW2 it was banned because of its connection with their enemy, but it was simply too engrained into the musical consciousness to be eradicated. Composers and musicians like Ryoichi Hattori, Noriko Awaya, and Koichi Sugii reworked Japanese folk songs and well-known theatre songs to create a uniquely Japanese form of the art, in a very similar way to the creation of the American Jazz canon. Time Out used Balkan and Turkish time signatures to create a sound unheard of before. As a more modern example, the Sachal Jazz ensemble from Lahore, Pakistan, and the Wynton Marsalis quintet played a tribute to John Coltrane’s works at the Marciac Jazz Festival in July 2013. This tribute saw the combination of standard western instrumentation by Wynton’s quintet with the addition of sitar, traditional flute, and various percussion by by the Sachal Jazz ensemble. All this is to say, discrediting Laufey’s music as non-jazz due to her not coming from the same Afro-American tradition means that so much of the jazz from around the world would have to be classified as something else despite clearly being, well… jazz.

I guess this essay has devolved into me just espousing my love of a genre that shaped my life in as many words as I can think of, but so much of that love was through not only the jazz I created and listened to, but through how it felt to share that with others. Some of my favorite memories are the bus ride back from an ensemble performance in high school, with all of us showing each other what we had been listening to recently, or talking to people after a gig about what it means to me to play trumpet and be apart of this community. That’s why I think I fell in love with Laufey’s music. The jazz greats of old are amazing and the young are all prodigies, but in Luafey’s story and come up I saw a reflection of myself and the love I feel for this music. The fact that she can play an Erroll Garner piece from 1954 and not only do justice to him but to Ella, Stan, and everyone else who has covered it over the years, and bring that to an audience of my peers in a way they never could is amazing to me.

Laufey isn’t reviving a dead genre, but she is bringing millions of fans to the door of the greatest genre on Earth and being told she doesn’t fill the prerequisites to come in. Gen Z is begging for jazz, to be shown the way and allowed to appreciate it. Please don’t kill a generation's love because it didn’t come about the way you want it to.

P.S Laufey if you read this add me on ista @jjosephdomingo <3