By Steve Provizer

From TikTok to the concert stage, the singer’s unaffected way with the Great American Songbook suggests a hopeful turn in an AI-drenched culture.

The cover art for Stella Cole’s album Imagination.

Since the early 2000s, internet performers have broken into the mainstream—Justin Bieber, Liza Koshy, Lil Nas X—alongside “content providers” like MrBeast and Markiplier, who churn out contest and gaming videos. Breaking through by singing unadorned versions of the Great American Songbook is another matter—and worth noting.

The singer in question is Stella Cole, a 27-year-old Midwesterner. She may have been the right person at the right time, but talent and presence turned opportunity into a career. I recently talked with her about her ascent from self-taped living-room videos to elite concert halls. Her story offers clues to jazz’s place in American culture—and, after years as a whipping boy for youth media, grounds for optimism about its future.

Cole grew up in Springfield, Illinois, an avid consumer of musicals from an early age. At four, she displayed what her parents called a “freakish” ability to learn and sing songs from Mary Poppins and other shows. Voice lessons followed. She also heard Sinatra, Nat Cole, Judy Garland, and Louis Armstrong, but her musical ambitions, if she had any, pointed toward Broadway.

She enrolled at Northwestern University as a dual major in international affairs and musical theatre but felt out of place. The approach to Broadway singing didn’t suit her voice or the way she connected with music. “I forgot how much I loved the music I listened to when I was younger,” she says of that period.

Then COVID hit. With the country in quarantine, the college junior began to find her footing. Her father, confident in her talent, suggested she record a video and post it online. She downloaded TikTok and began filming herself singing.

When I came across her videos, I was mightily impressed. Instead of the usual mainstream pop fare, she was singing jazz standards—and doing them full justice. Her presentation was unaffected: no gimmicks, just a talented, affable, attractive performer who clearly enjoyed the songs and knew how to make a listener feel them.

“During the lockdown, thousands of people were sending me messages saying, ‘You don’t know how much you’ve helped me,’ and ‘your music is the one thing cheering me up right now.’ And so I was sort of shocked by that because I hadn’t realized that music had that kind of power to help people. It’s amazing to think that my music can be a bit of a salve or a balm for people’s stress and anxiety. Don’t forget, these songs and this music helped people get through the Great Depression and World War II.”

Cole’s videos were drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers, and people began paying her to record personal greetings, including “Happy Birthday” for friends and family. “I was getting fifty dollars, sometimes even a hundred, and it amazed me.”

She had always wanted to live in New York. When a college roommate decided to move there after graduation, Cole joined her. She had no plans to pursue singing professionally, but the city rekindled her ambitions: “I was walking dogs and I would go by jazz brunches and other places where singers were performing and I thought, ‘Why not me?’”

She approached clubs and restaurants, offering to sing for meals or nothing at all, and began landing gigs. Her first, she recalls, was at Giovanni’s Brooklyn Eats, followed by an engagement at 54 Below. As audiences grew, she crowdfunded $60,000 to make her debut recording, Stella Cole. She also caught the attention of music-industry veterans and connected with Matt Pierson, a record producer and Samara Joy’s manager. Their ongoing collaboration has yielded “Snow,” “It’s Magic,” “Live at the Cafe Carlyle,” and her latest release, Imagination.

Singer Stella Cole. Photo: courtesy of the artist

Her regular trio—Michael Kanan on piano, Michael Migliore on bass and Hank Allen-Barfield on drums—backs her on Imagination. The tracks include “Imagination,” “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” “It Had to Be You,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” “Til There Was You” and “That’s All”: all standards, though on other albums she ventures into more contemporary material.

Whether Stella Cole is a jazz or a pop singer invites the same endless debate that swirls around Sinatra, Nat Cole and Rosemary Clooney. Cole doesn’t scat; she says it doesn’t feel authentically her own. I commend that restraint: scat, to my ears, is spread far too thin. Given how well she communicates, categorizing her seems a pointless abstraction.

Does her success signal a shift in the listening habits of young people raised on a steady diet of rock, pop and rap? She says her audiences span generations: “Maybe not at the Cafe Carlyle, a very expensive place, but in a lot of venues, older subscribers are surprised to see so many young people sitting next to them.” Cole thinks an AI-drenched culture is prompting people to rediscover what has lasting value. She mentions a friend writing an article for Elle about Gen Z’s return to jazz. “I think a lot of Gen Z is tired of automation and AI and scrolling on phones. Vinyl is cool again. People are walking around New York City listening to Walkmen. The American Songbook is timeless and I think they’re discovering that.”

Cole’s emotional connection to this music runs deep, and she gravitates toward songs built to last. I hesitate to read too much into one singer’s success, however talented she may be. Still, her rise offers a hopeful note in an otherwise bleak zeitgeist.

Steve Provizer writes on a range of subjects, most often the arts. He is a musician and blogs about jazz here.