Every day we play talents from all the world. @astridengberg___ is a Danish vocalist you should not miss. You can listen to her at M Jazz AAR in Ladies & Crooners and in our Eclectic Lounge. She is also playing at @kunstendk 23. July. Make sure to get a ticket.

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#jazzvocalists
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We play talents from all the world. So why not listen to some fantastic singers, such as @aprilvarnermusic and @mariemoerckmusic - you might find them at Ladies & Crooners at M Jazz AAR, every day from three. Marie Mørck plays live 15. May at Bellevue in Copenhagen.

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Laufey Sings “California and Me”

Listen to this track by Icelandic torch song jazz purveyor and recent Grammy winner Laufey (that’s pronounced Lay-vay, everyone). It’s “California and Me” from her 2023 record Bewitched. That album, her second, was universally praised in part for excelling in a capacity generally unheard of in the 2020s; making Forties and Fifties-style torch songs into something the kids can get into en masse while also garnering a Best Traditional Pop Album Grammy in 2024. This single, the fourth one from the record that preceded the album’s release, set up what was to come; a melancholic torch song that might just as easily have been a hit in 1953 as it was in 2023.

The strings and woodwinds from the Philharmonia Orchestra really help with this timeless effect, evoking Nelson Riddle’s wistful and blue arrangements for Nat King Cole. Laufey’s sonorous alto voice plumbs the depths of disappointment, hurt, and betrayal, her narrator being a person who thinks only the best of her departing lover and at great cost to her own heart in a song about being left behind.

The throwback sound of this song and others came as something of a surprise to critics. In a landscape of predictable and homogenized pop that the kids supposedly eat up as a matter of course, Laufey’s music is informed by a wider palette which in some respects proves that supposition to be too simple to be true, like most things. This is not to say that she rejects pop music as it stands in her era. Taylor Swift sits among her influences along with Franz Liszt, Ella Fitzgerald, and Chet Baker. But importantly, her approach is indicative of something vital in the music of the 21st century; that times and eras never really go away in the manner they once did.

A part of this phenomenon is helped along by the old real estate principle; location, location, location. In this case, that location is social media and specifically Tik Tok. You want a certain audience? Then go to where that audience is and proceed with authenticity as your guiding principle. That’s what Laufey did; present herself as she was very deliberately to a Gen Z viewership, many of them having no background as appreciators of 1950s-style torch songs and jazz balladry, but always on the lookout for something new and honest that they’ve never heard before.

Once again, this dispels the myth that the kids will eat anything put in front of them as long as they’ve consumed it before. Instead, it proves that they are active listeners and that they know when an artist is putting themselves across in an honest, unique way.

As for this song, it’s clear that Laufey has absorbed her influences with the intent of becoming an extension of them for her era and her audience. This is very different than simply appropriating a style to get views and likes as a mere curiosity. Having said that, this song’s subject matter is as timeless as anything in pop songs of any style. “California and Me” is a story about a casual betrayal by someone who never really knew what they wanted from the narrator, retreating into the familiar rather than facing up to what love might come to mean to them as something new.

Here, California’s ocean and the narrator become one as the lover abandons both for the opposite shore and into the arms of an old flame. Stuff like that hurts just as much when Laufey sings it on Tik Tok as it did when Peggy Lee and Julie London sang similar tales on the radio seventy years before.

Besides the universality of the themes, Laufey’s stylistic direction is indicative of a certain amount of freedom that artists of her generation have. This freedom is one that perhaps was not as easy to achieve in past eras due to how narrow the channels once were to build a mass crossover audience, Harry Connick, Jr. notwithstanding. In days of yore, you needed something akin to the weight of a major smash-hit romantic comedy in which your music is prominently featured, an arrangement that was also the product of a narrow channel to market.

Thanks to her generation’s affinity with the internet, the possibilities of musical exploration from listener to listener are unprecedented, impossible in an old world of limited formats and means to reach markets with even more limits on what styles sell, and which ones don’t. Today, the whole of pop music history is there to be discovered and with very few barriers to doing so. In this we have to momentarily set aside the very problematic relationship between music streaming services and artist compensation. This is to say nothing of the noise of being heard in this wider and more crowded field for artists and their potential audiences to navigate.

But with that exponential set of musical possibilities pulling from nearly a century of pop music, the idea of a musical style being irrevocably tied to a specific era is less of an assumption than it once was. What’s considered new is what is new to the discoverer, not about when it was recorded or even how old its traditions might be. The result of this is music that has no strict affiliation with one era or generation as long as new audiences can access it and appreciate it in their own context. In some ways, this has always been the case.

In this “California and Me” is as contemporary as any pop song, first because it deals with emotionally resonant themes against music that’s played and produced very well. But also because it’s the result of an artist who was turned on by a tradition of music that she has integrated into what she wants her own music to sound like. On that score and technology platforms aside, when has it been any different for songwriters and musicians who seek an audience as they develop their own artistic voices? The platforms may change, but the song remains the same.

Laufey is an active artist today. Check out news about releases and live shows at laufeymusic.com.

Check out Laufey’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert to get more of a sampling of her music.

To learn more about how Laufey developed as a musician and her connections with the traditional pop style that she specifically wanted to convey to an audience of her own generation, check out this interview with Laufey at Variety.

Enjoy!

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#2020sMusic #AmericanSongbook #ClassicPop #Jazz #JazzVocalists #Laufey

Thinking about the jazz vocalists we have lost, but who are still with us on CD.

#music #jazz #JazzVocalists #GreatAmericanSongbook

http://mypointbeing.com/2024/01/23/remembering-our-lost-vocalists/

I love the part in "Amy" where they show these two working on this together, Tony Bennett thrilled for brill young talents like Amy, supportive, encouraging.

#tonybennett #amywinehouse #jazzvocalists

"Body & Soul" from YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OFMkCeP6ok

I made a playlist of female Scandinavian jazz vocalists with a few Americans thrown in for good measure, a lovely listen this Sunday. 🎼

#Jazz #JazzVocalists #ScandinavianJazz

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2VQxeevcgHJd93eW2VMMJO?si=787413f890f647a1