The question arrives for every woman who sings well and sells records: is this jazz, or is it something lesser? Diana Krall heard it in the late 1990s, when her albums began outselling virtually every other jazz release on Verve's roster. Laufey is hearing it now, as her third album, "A Matter of Time," sits atop the Billboard Jazz Albums chart while her Grammy sits in the Best Traditional Pop Vocal category. The two artists are separated by a generation and by very different answers, but the question itself is the link — and tracing how each woman handled it tells you something essential about what this music asks of the people who make it.

Krall's answer was to go deeper into the tradition until the argument became unanswerable. Her sixth album, "The Look of Love," released by Verve on September 18, 2001, is the clearest statement of that strategy. The sessions stretched across three cities and six months: rhythm tracks cut January 22-27 at Avatar Studios in New York, the London Symphony Orchestra recorded March 9-11 at Abbey Road, and a final set of tracks laid down June 3-4 at Capitol Studios in Hollywood, where engineer Al Schmitt recalled that Krall got to use Frank Sinatra's microphone, the one he had used on most of his Capitol recordings. The arranger was Claus Ogerman, whose credits ran from Bill Evans and Stan Getz to Frank Sinatra himself, and whose string writing gave the album its particular quality of lushness without sentimentality. Guitarist Russell Malone appeared on most tracks. Producer Tommy LiPuma, Krall's most important creative collaborator, shaped the whole. The album won Al Schmitt a Grammy for Best Engineered Album. It topped the Canadian Albums Chart. And it did all of this while remaining, in its bones, a record built from Great American Songbook standards and from the kind of intimate piano-voice relationship that Krall had spent years learning from pianist Jimmy Rowles, who had himself accompanied Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee.

Krall's teacher Rowles is the key detail here. During those Los Angeles sessions with him, Rowles pressed Krall to develop her voice, told her stories about Holiday and Sarah Vaughan, and played records — Ben Webster, Duke Ellington — until the lineage was not an abstraction but a felt thing. What Krall built from that education was a dual authority: she could sit at the piano and hold her own in any jazz conversation, and she could also sing a Burt Bacharach title track over a lush orchestra without it feeling like a concession. The jazz world's suspicion of popular success never quite landed on her, because her instrumental credentials were too solid to dismiss. When critics at JazzTimes noted that "The Look of Love" reached toward a broad popular audience, they still acknowledged that her singing had improved with every album. The piano was always there, and the piano was proof.

Laufey's answer is almost the inverse, and it is worth paying close attention to how deliberately she has made it. She studied at Berklee College of Music, plays cello on most of the tracks of "A Matter of Time" — alongside piano and electric guitar — and describes the Great American Songbook as her "bible." She draws her vocal inspiration explicitly from Ella Fitzgerald. Her voice has been described by The Guardian's Katie Hawthorne as "unusual" and "honeyed," a low contralto that carries traces of Peggy Lee. And yet when the "jazz or not-jazz" question arrived, she did not fight it on the genre's own terms. "I don't consider my music jazz," she has said plainly. "I record jazz standards, I can be a jazz singer, but 90% of what I put on my albums is not jazz music." This is a different kind of honesty than Krall's, and it cost Laufey something: her Grammy for "Bewitched" at the 66th ceremony was in Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, not any jazz category, a placement NPR noted was consistent with how the Recording Academy has long handled popular women singers who work adjacent to jazz. "A Matter of Time," produced with her longtime collaborator Spencer Stewart and with Aaron Dessner of The National joining the process for the first time, won the same category again at the 68th Grammy Awards in 2026. She has accepted the label and kept moving.

What NPR's jazz writers identified in 2024 is the structural point that makes this conversation worth having: the writer Lara Pellegrinelli has tracked how "serious jazz" became equated with instrumental music partly as a way of managing those peskily popular women singers, and that Krall endured the same questions Laufey now faces. The tradition has a habit of raising the bar precisely when a woman clears it. Krall cleared it by becoming an instrumentalist of real standing. Laufey cleared it by refusing to compete on those terms at all, insisting instead that what she does is its own thing, rooted in the Songbook but not obligated to the genre's gatekeeping. Both moves are legitimate. Both carry costs. Krall's cost was years of study and the occasional charge of being too polished; Laufey's is the persistent suggestion that her enormous commercial reach disqualifies her from seriousness, a suggestion she has called heartbreaking.

The deepest connection between them is not biographical proximity or shared repertoire. It is that both women walked into a tradition that has always been ambivalent about its own most beloved voices, and both found a way to stay. Krall stood in Capitol Studios and looked at photographs of Sinatra and Nat King Cole on the wall and felt, as she put it in 2001, reduced to the size of a pea — and then made the record anyway. Laufey, two decades later, calls that same Songbook her bible and then makes albums that the jazz world can't quite claim and the pop world can't quite categorize. The question of whether either of them "counts" is the least interesting thing about either of them. What matters is what you actually hear: a pianist who learned her phrasing from a man who played for Billie Holiday, and a cellist-singer who posts jazz covers and sells out arenas and wins Grammys in a category that didn't exist to honor her. The tradition is larger than its arguments about itself.