Is Laufey Jazz?
...and some thoughts on what it means to call something "jazz" or not.
It’s been a while now since I unsubscribed from everyone’s favourite jazz YouTuber Adam Neely, but recently, I came across a video of his that – rather unusually – I decided to watch. It was entitled Is Laufey jazz?, and I’ve attached it below if you haven’t watched it. I do (tentatively) recommend it as a piece of commentary on the Laufey situation – if you don’t know who Laufey is, it’s also quite a good introduction to her and what this “Laufey situation” I’m talking about is.
I remember a year or so ago when Laufey was starting to get popular, and I saw some of her content appear on YouTube. It wasn’t entirely my cup of tea, but I certainly appreciated the skill. (Especially her cello/vocal performances, which are extremely impressive.) Basically, she makes what I consider to be “good music” (well-made, musical, enjoyable to listen to). I really thought no more of it than that.
However, after I watched Adam’s video, I thought rather quite a lot more of it than that. At the time, I jotted down my thoughts in the form of a comment on the video, but I never posted it, because I thought it would be cringe to do that. However, I held onto these thoughts in my notes app, and I’ve now attached them to this article (with some minor edits), because:
I think it’s worth saying/writing about,
I’m rather proud of how I said/wrote about it, and
It covers some ground that Adam didn’t explicitly cover in his video.
More broadly speaking, I’m posting this because I also think that nebulous questions like “Is Laufey jazz?” reinforce the more serious questions that we should be asking ourselves, like “am I playing jazz in a respectful way?” or “am I cheapening the jazz tradition by not doing my due diligence as a musical craftsperson?”.
My original thoughts
Anyway, here’s what I initially wrote:
I think this is a good video. If anything, my only criticism would be that it doesn’t emphasise strongly enough that Laufey is not jazz. Personally, I think jazz has been wayyyyyyy too broadly defined for a good while now. On the one hand, anything that borrows 1950s studio orchestra/classic Disney/mid-century pop aesthetics is called jazz, and then on the other hand, anything that has seventh chords/extended harmony/key changes is also called jazz – just by a different crowd. Both crowds are wrong, though. Jazz is neither of those things.
As much as there are certain problems with the Wynton Marsalis/Stanley Crouch definition of jazz that Adam mentions (which is basically jazz = swing + blues + improvisation), it’s also abundantly clear that it’s much closer to the truth than some nebulous “jazz is whatever you want it to be”-type definition. I also suspect that “why are you gatekeeping jazz?” is very much a White™ question to ask (and bear in mind, I am white myself, so I may be wrong here). Given the white dismissal, hostility and ridicule to which jazz has been subjected in the past, jazz culture developed to be fairly hostile and unforgiving, in order to protect itself from Glenn Miller-ization, and to stop it from being co-opted to sell crappy records.
Whilst that can make jazz harder to access for younger people today, if it still helps to stop surface-level “jazz”-isms being tacked onto boring pop records as a sales tactic, is that maybe... a good thing? At the very least, let’s acknowledge the reason why gatekeeping exists in jazz. It was a safeguard against cultural appropriation (I mean, let’s not mince words, often downright racism). If, as a white person, I have to fight harder to prove my worth as a jazz musician, I think that’s OK. Sadly, there is every reason to believe that I’m more likely to play jazz as a surface-level approximation rather than as an authentic contribution to the tradition.
Addendum
I’m also reminded of what saxophonist Patrick Bartley had to say about this whole debate (in this video). Instead of the question “why can’t Laufey be jazz?”, he instead asks, “why does Laufey have to be jazz?”. I think this is a very important question. If you’re asking “why can’t this music that I like/play/create be jazz?” – why do you think you’re owed a place in the jazz tradition? The term “jazz” isn’t a measure of the value of the music to which it is attached. Jazz is a term that describes the musical and cultural characteristics, trademarks and traditions of a piece of music, not a catch-all shorthand for “good music”. If someone says that the music you like/play/create isn’t jazz, they’re not saying it’s bad, they’re just saying it belongs to a different tradition.
Keep in mind here – it doesn’t mater if you’re borrowing the aesthetics of jazz when making your music. You can make music that sounds like jazz and it still might not be jazz. Even though I don’t think “swing + blues + improvisation” covers all bases, I’d much rather that definition than “studio orchestra arrangement + extended chromatic harmony”. Simply put: seventh chords are not jazz.
In fact, I could over-simplify, and say that the basic recipe for most Western music (especially post-1900) is roughly the same regardless of genre. The way that melodies, chord progressions, rhythms and song-forms work is not radically different from classical music to jazz to pop to country to Anglo folk music to whatever else you might choose to mention. If you want to write jazz music, you have to look a bit deeper than that. It’s a perspective and a sound and a culture and a feeling. It’s not just playing “Misty”. (I mean, Ray Stevens recorded a countrified version of “Misty” in the 70s, and there’s no doubt that that isn’t jazz.)
Anyway, that’s all I have to say! The end. Why not subscribe, if you enjoyed reading this? I might post something else sometime soon(ish).