(Twenty-seventh of a series)
Junji Delfino was singing before she could remember not singing—at 4 years old, already finding melodies, and by 10, slipping into Manila’s jazz clubs with a father who wouldn’t have known how to keep her away even if he tried.
Before she even turned 10, Junji recalls, her father Bert Delfino made her learn to sing “Blame It on My Youth”—a torch song about grown-up regret, handed to a child not nearly old enough to understand it. Hearing her cover the standard at a 2022 New York jazz club gig with the Vince Lateano Trio, you catch it: the girlish sweetness of that voice grown into the fuller ache of understanding—love and youth will betray you eventually.
Bert Delfino was a leading figure in Manila’s postwar jazz scene, playing drums in a trio at the clubs on Dewey Boulevard. He was also a TV actor, part of the cast of the hit 1970s Filipino sitcom “Kuwentong Kutsero” in which he played Chinese shop owner Akong Santosi, and picked up acting recognition for it.
Junji absorbed the music the way children absorb a first language: without effort, without deciding to. Decades later, that absorption would carry her across the region into another country and into a genre-blurring stage career, and eventually onto the set of one of the biggest films of the last decade.
But ask her about any single chapter—the 30-year wait before her debut solo album, the “accidental” leap into theater, the unexpected notice she got for a small role in “Crazy Rich Asians”—and she’ll likely tell you the same thing: It was never really separate. Singing, acting, comedy: For Junji, it’s all storytelling. She just changes the instrument.
Based in Kuala Lumpur, Junji is often described across Malaysia as the “Queen of Jazz” or “First Lady of Jazz.” But, she says, “I have a general aversion to [the Queen] label. I am not queen, nor do I have aspirations to be called one. I have learned to appreciate being introduced as the First Lady of Jazz as—in truth, and this is by no means out of arrogance—everyone acknowledges that there is currently no one who can step up to bat in that field in the local context. So please take this as an official plea: No Queen.”
In any case, Junji has spent decades proving that a voice shaped in one country’s smoky clubs can find an entirely new home in another’s—and that a life built around jazz rarely stays confined to the stage.
From Manila, with love
Junji started out singing in jazz clubs in the Philippines back in the 1980s, following in her father’s footsteps, before moving to Malaysia in the 1990s and landing at the famous All That Jazz club in KL.
She recalls: “All That Jazz first happened in late 1985 but it wasn’t until four years later that KL became my permanent home. The initial transition felt like getting reconnected with my lost tribe! See, even I didn’t realize that the ’80s jazz scene in Manila was slowly being propelled more by fusion bands and the jazz R&B craze that swept through my generation. From my memory, ‘old skool jazz’ was mostly found in hotel piano bars or lounges. And there were hardly any jazz bands with the traditional trio or quartet setups that played straight-ahead jazz in the same way I remember my dad and his bands used to do back in the day.
“Then I walk into All That Jazz, packed to [the rafters], filled with smoke and the smell of beer, and a quartet burning ‘Scrapple From The Apple’ on stage, and I was like…whoa! [It was] like seeing an old friend you’ve not been in contact with for a while.”
Soon after arriving in KL, she began a long-time collaboration with composer/pianist David Gomes (who later became her husband), producing tribute shows to artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra. Despite singing jazz for 30 years, her debut solo album “Here I Am” wasn’t released until 2010, followed by a Christmas album with David in 2014. She has performed at jazz festivals across Southeast Asia and the US, including the first KL International Jazz Festival in 2012.
Junji has worked with musicians like Tay Cher Siang and the WLi Cheah Quartet, and continues to host masterclasses on jazz singing. She’s the founder and executive director of Jazz Works, the organization behind the ESG Jazz Festival and KL’s first International Jazz Day Jazz Marathon.
She also became an “accidental actor,” having jumped in as a substitute with Instant Cafe Theatre, a notable institution founded in late 1989 by four friends known for blending comedy, political satire, and boundary-pushing work across Malaysia’s theater scene.
But here’s what’s refreshing about Junji: She likes trying new things for size, and is one for whom a “comfort zone” makes little sense.
“To be completely honest, a few years back, I would have declared that I am an ‘accidental everything’ in all that I do,” she says. “The way I got into music was, to me, an accident. I got a call one day from the late Butch Dans—I might have been 19 at the time—asking me to come for an audition. I had never met him before so I was like, audition…me? I could be wrong but don’t think I had even started singing anywhere back then! But I didn’t ask questions, got my permission from my dad, and I went to Butch and Beta’s house to give it a shot.”
“Lo and behold,” she adds, “I became a temporary replacement for Judith Torres who was Fourplay’s soprano at the time. She came back to the job and I worked for Butch for a while, as his PA. Then I got another call from Girlie Rodis asking me to come in for an audition to sing back-up with Mila Garcia for Ivy Violan and the 8th of September! Then from there I joined Birth of the Cool, did some slots at Bert Nievera’s Music Lounge, a few others in between before I joined Richard Merk’s Star Band at Manila Mandarin.”
She is amused by this rush of recollection, 40 years later, grateful almost, for the clarity and the insight into so-called inadvertent moments: that no matter how accidental some things in her life may look, they were, in fact, predestined. She won’t resist the word “accidental,” but she won’t let it mean “meaningless.”
Other stages
Junji’s own theatrical highlight came in 2019, when she earned high praise in Adelaide for playing multiple roles in the avant-premiere of “Light,” a joint Malaysia-Australia production for the OzAsia Festival based on the life of Francis and William Light.
She has also done comedic one-woman, cabaret-style shows, like “Will The Real Junji Delfino Please Stand Up?”, blending jazz singing with stand-up comedy.
Her film breakout came via a small but memorable role when she played Astrid’s maid in the 2018 global hit “Crazy Rich Asians,” appearing in the end credits ahead of Kris Aquino’s Princess Intan.
But how different are jazz singing, the “nowness” of theater, and acting for cinema?
“[They’re] equally demanding in their own way,” Junji says. “The challenge for me was to curb the jazz instinct…I do suffer from the same syndrome across all my acting gigs. I can still get around it with theater because it’s all happening live, but it’s a lot more challenging in front of the camera, especially for continuity! Instinct runs deep in me and it applies to both singing and acting. This feels right here, this feels right now. Until I get pulled aside by the continuity-in-charge with a, ‘Miss Junji, just now you flicked your hair back when you said this line…’”
You’d think that by now she’s sung every song there is to sing. But two still elude her: “Sophisticated Lady” and “The Party’s Over”—both, she says with a laugh, “due to PTSD from my dad getting frustrated that I couldn’t get the notes right!” CS
Read more: Portraits in Jazz: For Mon David, jazz is always
