Listen to WHRO's interview with conductor Ross Jamie Collins
As mainstream music success stories go, Laufey is one of the unlikeliest.
Take, first of all, that she’s an Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter, which, in and of itself, is pretty rare on the U.S. charts. (There’s fellow Icelander Bjork, and…that’s pretty much it.) From there, consider that she’s a 20-something who favors jazz, has cited Ella Fitzgerald and Chet Baker as influences, while also citing Adele, Norah Jones and Taylor Swift as inspirations for her musicianship.
“When I started out, people were always asking me, ‘Who do you want to be like?’ ” Laufey told Billboard in 2023. “I had no idea what to say. I still have no clue what to say. The difference is now I don’t need to. I’m just going to keep making the music I want and hope that it reaches as many ears as possible.”
Thanks to her skill with social media — particularly Instagram and TikTok — Laufey has done well at that task, including a Top 20 studio album (2023’s “Bewitched”) and a live album (2024’s “A Night at the Symphony: Hollywood Bowl”) that topped the U.S. classical and jazz charts. She won the 2024 Grammy for Traditional Pop Vocal Album.
She’s doing two nights with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra at Norfolk’s Chartway Arena this week. Tickets sold so well for the Thursday performance that the Virginia Arts Festival, which is producing the show, added the Wednesday date.
Ella Brindley, 20, will be driving from Richmond for Thursday’s concert.
“I feel like a lot of times when musicians try to re-create trends from past decades, it ends up sounding very dated and doesn't work, but I've never really felt that with her music,” Brindley said. “She's doing a great job of honoring jazz and traditional pop and classical music and bossa nova while still very much making it her own.”
The performances are billed, like her live album, as “A Night at the Symphony,” and her conductor will be Ross Jamie Collins, who met Laufey through her mother.
Collins won a conductor-in-residence position with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, in which Laufey’s mother plays, Collins said in a recent interview with WHRO’s Jana Lee Ross. He learned that Laufey was going to perform in Iceland and messaged her on Instagram. He said, “something along the lines of, ‘Hey, your mom says, hi, can I please come and see the show, because it's sold out.’ He got the tickets and met her backstage.
This tour is the first time that Collins and Laufey have worked together and he’s excited about the opportunity and the music that they’ll be performing.
“It's her world,” Collins said. “ There's a lot of elements of classical in there, there's definitely loads of elements of jazz music in there, and there are a couple of moments in there that give me goosebumps, because the arrangements that have been made for it are phenomenal. The whole line of the concert and the way it's structured, it's got this kind of swagger about it that I hope to be able to help her shine through on that.”
Visit vafest.org for tickets and more information.
