Thousands of Taiwanese love Dutch jazz diva Laura Fygi, but few are as ardent as the man who waits for her after a performance each time she tours here, with a white dinner jacket that he asks her - and only her - to sign.
"It says, 'Love, Laura 2002,' 'Love Laura 2005.' This whole jacket is covered with my signatures from every year that I've been there," says Fygi, who's returning to Taiwan this weekend for concerts at Taipei's International Convention Center (台北國際會議中心) and Chih-Teh Hall (高雄至德堂) in Kaohsiung. "I've covered the back, so probably this time I'll write on the front."
Fygi - sounds like Fee-jee - has charmed legions of adoring Taiwanese fans with her sentimental ballads, Latin numbers and sultry renditions of jazz standards. She's sold 300,000 copies of her albums here, and this weekend's tour will be the sixth time she's visited the country since 1997.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF DA DA ARTS
There's something about the emotion in her voice, how she asks her audiences to dance with her during shows, and the songs she chooses for her albums and concerts - many of which are recognizable whether she sings them in English, Spanish, French or Chinese - that seems to really strike a chord with audiences here.
"They like my music and the shows are always happy," Fygi says of her Taiwanese fans. "I let them do things with me. It's not like I'm sitting there and singing 26 songs. It's like it's a party. I think that's what they like about."
"My whole character is projected in my music," she continues. "I'm not singing; I'm telling stories and I'm telling them as me. At the moment I live the story."
Fygi got her start in showbiz as part of 1980s disco girl band Centerfold, which was big in Europe and Japan. The band played heavily on sex appeal amid the heady atmosphere of the waning days of disco, and Fygi herself was featured on the cover of the Dutch version of Playboy while in Centerfold.
She views her time with Centerfold as "a seven-year school" and a "premier" for her solo career. The experience taught her how to make contact with the audience, and she still does provocative things in concert, like taking a man up on stage and doing a song with him. "It's me, I'm the vamp at that moment," she says. "I like that."
She was "discovered" again - this time as a jazz singer - by one of her managers while she was still with Centerfold. The two were watching a jazz trio in a hotel bar one evening when, on a whim, she stood up and asked to sing with the band.
"I didn't know you liked this kind of music," she recalls him telling her afterwards. "If the time is right for it we'll have to do something with it."
Centerfold broke up after the suicide of one of its members, and Fygi took a break from music. When she decided to launch a solo career in 1991 as a jazz vocalist, she called the manager, who had gone on to become an A&R manager at Polygram Records, now part of Universal Music Group.
Her first solo album, Introducing Laura Fygi, did surprisingly well in the Netherlands and earned her an Edison Award, the Dutch equivalent of a Grammy. Her second, Bewitched, has sold 100,000 units in Taiwan alone. In total she's released 11 albums, including last year's Rendez-vous.
Commenting on the transition from pop to jazz, she says in a phone interview from her home near the Dutch city of Hillverson, "Singing pop and rock is nice, up to a certain age. When you're getting older you like less noise, you have more emotion in your life, you live your life in a different way and you experience so much more - you want to reflect so much more."
"To me you can't do that in 'poppy' songs. It's all about yelling. I don't want to yell anymore," she says.
But her music still has mass appeal. "Real jazz fans - they are not my fans, to tell you the truth," she says. "My music is not pure enough for them."
"My fans are exactly as I am. I'm not into pure jazz either. If a musician freaks out on the trumpet, I hate that. I still have to hear the melody, the emotion."
Asked if she has a message for her fans in Taiwan, she pauses for a second or two, then says, "I'm just very excited to see them all again. It's been a few years now. I hope everyone will come again and have a party with me."
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