Singer, pianist and songwriter Nicole Zuraitis has spent much of her career hearing variations on the same question: what exactly is this music?
Is it jazz? Is it pop? Is it cabaret? Her new album, The Devil I Knew, doesn’t exactly settle the question. Instead, it makes the question seem increasingly beside the point.
It’s a sprawling, 20-song project produced by Larry Klein, with string arrangements by Vince Mendoza, horn charts by Jerry Hey, and musicians including Larry Goldings, John Cowherd, Gilad Hekselman and Dean Parks alongside her working quartet which includes her husband, Dan Pugach on drums.
And for Zuraitis, its scale is part of the idea.
She explains, “I watched a video on social media where someone said you have to build a world around your music in this day and age, because you can't just spit out albums anymore. And I was like, ‘Well, what's my world?’ I mean, I'm a 40-year-old, burgeoning witch. Like, what's my world? Nobody wants to come to this world.”
But Zuraitis decided to build it anyway. The breakthrough came when a friend described a moment in her own life when she realized that, after years of seeing herself as the victim, she had become the villain in someone else’s story. Zuraitis was fascinated by the idea that the hero and the villain could be the same person.
That became part of the world of The Devil I Knew — a record about reckoning with your own choices, told by an artist fascinated by narrative, drama, and what she calls “jazz lore”: the stories and mythology that surround the music.
And she’s been pushing against some of the assumptions about how much of that storytelling belongs in jazz.
She tells me, “Why don't we do this in jazz? Why is it embarrassing for an artist to be theatrical? Why is it if a song has a good hook, that's no longer jazz, it's now pop or cabaret? Why does it have to be hard to be good in jazz?”
That question also led Zuraitis to found the Modern Songbook Society, a project devoted to the idea that the Great American Songbook doesn’t necessarily have to be a closed book.
For Zuraitis, that also means creating a new common repertoire: musicians writing together, recording one another’s songs, and allowing new material to circulate.
She says, “There's so many great songwriters. Why aren't we singing each other's songs? Where's the community? Where's the collaboration?”
Zuraitis has had plenty of time to think about where she fits. In 2024, Zuraitis won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album for How Love Begins. But the award didn’t suddenly deliver a record deal or an industry machine. She and her husband, drummer Dan Pugach, still largely manage their careers themselves.
She describes herself as a late bloomer. She came to New York at 25, spent years working background gigs, touring, writing, learning and perfecting her recipe.
As she tells it, “I wasn't a fully baked cake until I was 37 years old. Like, I was a late bloomer. I didn't burst into the scene when I moved to New York at 25. [...] I was so nervous. And just constantly learning. And so my cake was not even fully baked. But then once it's baked, I'm like, ‘For crying out loud, nobody wants this cake? Like, this is good cake. Somebody wants this cake? No? Fine. I'll eat the cake. It's fine.’”
The cake, as it turns out, has a lot of ingredients.
She explains, “Jazz is so beautiful because it's insular and it's all about tradition, but I'm not an insular person [...] There's so much music that has influenced me and my sound. I can't just ignore it because then if I ignore it, then I'm only imitating other jazz singers. I'm not my cake that I baked. The cake is full of all different types of genres of music.”
She brings the world of The Devil I Knew to Drom in New York on September 30.
