Grammy Award-winning vocalist, pianist, composer and arranger Nicole Zuraitis is preparing to perform at the 36th Akbank Jazz Festival. Zuraitis won the Grammy Award for ‘Best Jazz Vocal Album’ in 2024 for “How Love Begins”, co-produced with Christian McBride. She was already familiar with Istanbul’s jazz scene before winning the Grammy: having previously performed at Nardis Jazz Club, Zuraitis will meet Turkish audiences once again on October 10 at Zorlu PSM Turkcell Platinum Stage.
For Nicole Zuraitis, jazz is not a repertoire confined to the past; it is a living language that continually expands, changes and is re-written through new stories. While preserving the legacy of the ‘Great American Songbook’, the Grammy Award-winning artist creates a musical space she describes as the ‘Modern Songbook,’ adding her own compositions as well as influences from folk, pop, soul and poetry. Her transformation of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” into a dark and haunting jazz narrative, along with her Grammy-winning album “How Love Begins,” co-produced with Christian McBride, reflects this philosophy in different ways.
The artist, who performed at Nardis Jazz Club before winning the Grammy Award, will now meet audiences on October 10 at Zorlu PSM Turkcell Platinum Stage as one of the guests of the 36th Akbank Jazz Festival. The festival’s approach of bringing jazz’s historical legacy and contemporary productions together within the same program also resonates with Zuraitis’s own balance between tradition and experimentation.
Her latest album, “The Devil I Knew”, is a five-part narrative in which the artist takes a more direct look at her own past, relationships, desires, mistakes and responsibilities. Drawing inspiration from the poetry of Dorothy Parker and Emily Dickinson, the album demonstrates the space Zuraitis has opened up beyond her identity as a jazz vocalist, as a composer and storyteller. In her view, an artist’s role is not only to create music, but also to continue being curious, taking risks and connecting with the world.
Ahead of her Istanbul performance, we spoke with Nicole Zuraitis for Jazz Magazine about jazz as a living and constantly evolving form of music, the inner transformation brought about by winning a Grammy, her musical and personal partnership with Dan Pugach, her sense of social responsibility as an artist, the role of poetry in her songwriting, and the new sounds she hopes to discover in Istanbul.
Welcome to Istanbul! You are performing at the 36th Akbank Jazz Festival, a long-standing festival with deep roots in Akbank Sanat. How does it feel to bring your music to Turkish audiences at such an iconic festival?
I’m thrilled. I love playing for audiences who are really listening, and there’s something especially exciting about coming somewhere with such a deep cultural history. I want to eat everything, walk everywhere, hear as much music as possible, and take in the culture while I’m here.
The best part of travelling with music is that you get to communicate with people before you even speak the same language. That’s one of the things I love most about jazz. We can all understand a groove, a melody, a little tension, a little release. I’m really excited to see what happens when my quartet brings our musical language into that environment.
Istanbul has long been a meeting point of different cultures, traditions and musical influences. Do you feel that this particular texture of the city resonates with the improvisational and eclectic nature of your music?
Absolutely. My music is basically obsessed with the idea that things can coexist that you might not initially expect to belong together. I’m very interested in the space between genres and between traditions.
I call what I’m doing the ‘Modern Songbook.’ I love the ‘Great American Songbook’, but I also think the songbook should still be alive and growing. Jazz has always evolved by absorbing different influences, and I don’t think we should be afraid of that. Istanbul itself feels like such a beautiful example of that—different histories, cultures, sounds and traditions constantly meeting each other.
And that’s really what improvisation is to me: you bring your history into the room, somebody else brings theirs, and then you figure out together what happens next.
As a New York-based artist who collaborates widely, how familiar are you with the Turkish jazz scene? Are there any Turkish jazz musicians or elements of Turkish musical traditions that have caught your attention, or that you are particularly looking forward to discovering while you are here?
I’m coming to Istanbul with a lot of curiosity. One of my favourite clubs in New York City is DROM which is owned by incredible Turkish friends of mine. I have a deep love for them and the culture.
One of the beautiful things about being a musician in New York is that you’re constantly encountering people from completely different musical backgrounds. I’m fascinated by traditional music from all over the world and especially by what happens when those traditions meet improvisation.
So I’m really looking forward to discovering Turkish musicians while I’m there. Hopefully I’ll leave Istanbul with a few new musical rabbit holes to fall down.
The Akbank Jazz Festival has a reputation for showcasing a broad spectrum of music, from heritage jazz to cutting-edge avant-garde projects. When you receive festival invitations from around the world, what makes you say “yes”? And what do you think makes your musical identity a good fit for this year’s line-up?
I love festivals that understand that jazz is a living music. For me, jazz isn’t a museum piece. It’s a language. It’s supposed to change, and it’s supposed to reflect the people making it right now.
That’s a big part of why the Akbank Jazz Festival invitation excited me. My music lives in that space between tradition and experimentation. I love standards, I love swing, I love the history of jazz—but I also write my own songs, I bring in folk, pop, soul, poetry and contemporary ideas. I want to honour the tradition by participating in it, not by freezing it in place. I like challenging the audience to listen and use their imagination—the jazzlore I bring is storytelling.
Your latest album, “The Devil I Knew”, is described as an ambitious, five-part concept album exploring self-reckoning. What triggered this deep desire for self-reflection and accountability in your songwriting this time?
I think I got to a point in my life where I was less interested in pretending I had everything figured out.
The album is about relationships, addiction, desire, grief, resilience, mistakes, and the ways we can sometimes participate in our own suffering. The title “The Devil I Knew” is really about recognizing the familiar things that aren’t necessarily good for us just because they’re familiar.
I also became fascinated with the idea of the trickster—the part of ourselves that knows better but still wants to touch the hot stove.
And I didn’t want to make a record where I’m the innocent victim of every story. That’s boring. I wanted to ask, “What was my part in this? What did I learn? What do I do differently now?”
There’s a lot of humour in the record, too. I think self-reflection is much more useful when you can laugh at yourself a little.
You elegantly integrated poetry from iconic female writers like Dorothy Parker and Emily Dickinson into the album’s movements. How did their literary voices help you shape the musical narrative of “The Devil I Knew?”
I’ve leaned into poetry when I have writer’s block as a songwriter and need inspiration. I love when a few words can completely rearrange the furniture in your brain.
These women were writing about desire, loneliness, death, love, identity, society and human behaviour with incredible honesty. There’s something about hearing a woman articulate an experience that has been sitting inside you but that you didn’t have language for. Their intergenerational voices are just echoing the sentiments we live with today.
I wanted the poetry to feel like part of the architecture of the album rather than decoration. “The Devil I Knew” is divided into five movements, almost like a little psychological journey, and the literary voices help create those different emotional worlds.
I also love the contrast between the very old tradition of poetry and the very immediate language of a contemporary song. That’s very much what the Modern Songbook is about for me—putting new stories into a lineage that already exists.
Your striking rearrangement of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” earned you a Grammy nomination in 2019 and completely redefined the song’s emotional weight. You transformed a country track into a dark, haunting jazz narrative. What drew you to “Jolene” initially, and how did you approach deconstructing such an iconic country song to make it uniquely your own?
I love a song where the lyrics are already so emotionally loaded that you can change the musical context and suddenly discover a completely different person hiding inside it.
“Jolene” is basically a psychological horror story. This woman is begging another woman not to take her man. There’s desperation, jealousy, insecurity, obsession—it’s dark!
I didn’t want to make a jazz version that sounded like I had simply put seventh chords underneath Dolly Parton. I wanted to completely change the emotional landscape. We slowed it down, made it darker and more intimate, and treated the narrator almost like she was unravelling in real time.
That’s one of the things I love about jazz: you can take a song everyone thinks they know and say, “Okay, but what if we look at it from over here?”
With “How Love Begins”, you won the Grammy for ‘Best Vocal Jazz Album’ with a record of all original songs-which is quite rare in the jazz world. Did that validation change your creative process or give you more freedom when writing your latest music?
Winning that Grammy was incredibly validating, but I think the biggest change was internal. I stopped feeling like I needed permission.
I had already been writing my own music for years, but there’s a funny thing that happens when somebody gives you a trophy and says, “Yes, this thing you were doing is legitimate.” You realize you didn’t actually need the trophy to know it was legitimate. It was the first time ever, man or woman, that an artist who wrote and arranged all the songs on the winning album won a GRAMMY. What a tremendous honour.
“The Devil I Knew” is even more unapologetically me. I wrote, arranged and performed a huge amount of the material, and Larry Klein produced the record. I’m interested in expanding the idea of what a jazz vocal album can be.
Wayne Shorter famously described jazz as “I dare you.” That’s the spirit I want to keep. I want to dare myself to make something I haven’t heard before and cut down a path for others to follow me down as well.
You are a pianist, arranger and vocalist as well as a songwriter. When a new song idea comes to you, do you usually experience it first as a lyrical theme, a piano melody or a vocal arrangement?
It’s completely inconsistent, which is probably the most honest answer.
Sometimes I have a lyric that hits me in the face and I have to grab my phone before I forget it. Sometimes it’s a melody. Sometimes it’s a harmonic idea. Sometimes I’m walking around singing something ridiculous into a voice memo and six months later I realize, “Oh, that’s a song.”
I actually learned piano because I needed to be able to accompany myself as a working singer in New York. I’m not one of those people who grew up thinking, “I’m going to become a pianist.” The piano became a tool for songwriting and arranging.
For me, the song always comes first. Whatever gets me to the song is the right instrument.
You are performing with your quartet, including your long time collaborator and husband Dan Pugach on drums. How does sharing both your life and the stage with Dan shape the live energy and spontaneous communication of your band?
Dan and I have been playing together for so long that there’s a level of communication that happens without words. Sometimes I’ll change something on stage and I’ll see his face and know, “Okay, he got it.”
But honestly, being married to your drummer is also a great way to learn how to communicate very efficiently. I love him and am so thankful to share this life with him. He’s also a Grammy-winning composer. And super handsome of course, HA!
We’ve spent years developing a shared musical vocabulary. Our quartet has played together for a long time, too, so there’s a lot of trust. I can take a risk because I know they’ll catch me—or at least they’ll make the mistake interesting.
Beyond music, you are deeply involved in mental health awareness, environmental responsibility, and animal rescue. Do you view your platform as an artist as a tool for social responsibility, and how does your activism feed into your art?
Absolutely. I don’t really know how to separate being an artist from being a human being.
If I have a platform, I think it would be a waste not to use it for things I care about. I also don’t think every song needs to be a political manifesto. Sometimes you help people by making them laugh. Sometimes you make a song that gives someone language for something they’ve been feeling. Sometimes you need to stop your day to rescue an animal in need. Being a helper means you have to be willing to inconvenience yourself in order to assist others. I feel like it’s my calling.
For me, the important thing is authenticity. I don’t want to perform activism. I want to actually participate in my community and try to leave things a little better than I found them.
That definitely finds its way into my songwriting. I’m interested in human behaviour, and caring about the world means caring about the complicated creatures living in it—including ourselves.
You’ve said that curiosity is something you’re most protective of in yourself. As you prepare to come to Istanbul, what are you most looking forward to discovering here?
I’m really excited to come to Istanbul and truly honoured to play this legendary festival.
I feel incredibly lucky that music has given me the opportunity to sit in a room—or stand on a stag—with people all over the world and communicate without needing to have the same background.
And I’m still curious. That’s probably the thing I’m most protective of in myself. I want to keep being curious, keep writing songs, keep getting better, keep being surprised, and keep making room at the table.
Also, I’m definitely going to need restaurant recommendations!
