Dutch jazz singer Laura Fygi (pronounced Feejee) will be making a two-day sweep through Taipei this weekend starting tonight, with two concerts at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.
Fygi is no stranger to Taiwan, where she has a broad and adoring fan base won over by her brand of ultra-sentimental ballads and her sultry renditions of jazz standards. This weekend will be her first performance in Taiwan in two-and-a-half years, though she regularly tours Asia.
Commenting on her popularity in the region, she said in a phone interview from Shanghai, "There's a lot of emotion in jazz, bossa nova and Latin music. I think it connects with audiences here. People [in Asia] are more expressive, more open."
Though she describes herself as "definitely very Dutch," by which means "punctual, no-nonsense and very forward." The more fiery, Latin side of her personality was ingrained early and deeply during her formative years, growing up in Uruguay where her father worked as a manager for the electronics firm Philips.
There, she said, the sounds and rhythms of South American music were an inextricable part of the surroundings and inevitably influenced her own approach to music and triggered her life-long love affair with jazz.
But before getting into jazz, Fygi first enjoyed a career in a three-piece disco girl band called Centerfold that was popular in Europe and Japan in the 1980s.
"I loved being in a pop rock band. I learned a lot in Centerfold, like how to get more certain of myself and how to work in the studio. It was a very visual band, working with bodies and dancing. We had these little dances we used to do," she said, laughing.
Starkly different from her current jazz matron persona, Fygi was featured on the cover of the Dutch version of Playboy while in Centerfold. The band played heavily on sex appeal amid the heady atmosphere of the waning days of disco.
But the party ended with the suicide of one of Centerfold's members, after which Fygi took a brief respite from music before deciding to launch a solo career in 1991 as a jazz vocalist.
"We just decided to do it," she said, speaking of her collaboration with long-time manager Herman van der Zawn. "When the first album came out nobody expected it to be so big."
But the first album, Introducing Laura Fygi, blew up in Holland and earned her an Edison Award, the Dutch equivalent of a Grammy.
She's since released 10 albums. "So we must be doing something good," she said.
Over the years she's enjoyed the collaboration of many of Europe's top talents, like Toots Thielemans, Philip Catherine and Michel Legrand, the latter of whom has been involved in two albums and a breakthrough live performance in 1997 at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague.
Her sound has changed over the years but is consistently smooth and on many tracks is almost comically breathy, like a pin-up songstress seducing the crowd through thick clouds of smoke. She becomes quite spunky, though, on the Latin numbers and that's where she taps the party energy in her shows.
"Whenever I play it's my party and I'm inviting everyone to it. That's why I only play songs I love, because when I'm having fun playing them the audience can tell. And then it's a party," she said.
For the current tour, Fygi will be playing sets taken from old albums and her last release, The Very Best Time of Year: The Christmas Album, which she said was released late in Asia and will soon get a second release in the region. The re-release will include a few surprises, possibly an additional English-language duet with Julio Iglesias.
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