John Bommarito: This is the Song Break on 89.1 WEMU. I'm John Bomarito. Joining me on the phone today, I'm very happy to welcome Grammy winner and future performer at the Blue LLama Jazz Club, Nicole Zuraitis. Welcome to WEMU, Nicole!
Nicole Zuraitis: Hey, John!
John Bommarito: You're visiting one of the premier jazz clubs in the area on September 23rd. How excited are you?
Nicole Zuraitis: It's our first time ever being there. So many wonderful artists that we love and respect have played. I've heard great things about Ann Arbor, just that it's a beautiful, great place. So we're pumped.
John Bommarito: All of those things are true. I think when you walk in the club, you're going to feel a sense of, “wow, this is beautiful, this is great!” You know, it's a really cool place to be and a nice date night as well. And it'd be a good opportunity for people to go out on a Wednesday night and take somebody they love or maybe like a little bit out to dinner and some great music. They don't have to love them.
Nicole Zuraitis: Yeah, you could like, you can like them, that's fine.
John Bommarito: Tell me a little bit about your background, Nicole. Where did you grow up?
Nicole Zuraitis: I'm originally from Connecticut, from Waterbury, Connecticut. I grew up in Connecticut. And then I went to NYU in New York City for a degree in classical voice. And ironically, I teach there now. I teach contemporary voice in jazz at NYU, but I kind of in a roundabout way found my way from classical back to jazz because I was a jazz trombone player in high school. I started falling in love with the Ella Fitzgerald songbook and now I'm a jazz singer-songwriter.
John Bommarito: And it's a good thing, because it's worked out pretty well for you.
Nicole Zuraitis: Yes, so far so good.
John Bommarito: I was reading some information about you, and this is something I don't see in a lot of bios, especially of jazz musicians. Competitive soccer. I bet not a lot performers share that distinction of going in a route that is completely different from that.
Nicole Zuraitis: Yeah, now I can barely run a quarter mile, never mind the length of a couple of football fields.
John Bommarito: I get it. Well, you also looked like you used to play the trombone. Do you ever play that anymore?
Nicole Zuraitis: I do not, I do have my plastic P-bones still. My dad is convinced that it would be the best party trick on stage. I just haven't. I lost my chops, that's for sure.
John Bommarito: A friend of mine also had a background in classical singing before she took a left turn and went into the singer-songwriter mode, but I have convinced her on one occasion to do Nessun Dorma, to start off a show before she went into her regular singer- songwriter thing. Have you ever thought about sort of stunning the audience by doing something from your classical singing days before you go into your jazz stuff?
Nicole Zuraitis: Well, when we were in Italy, we were playing at this brilliant classical hall and I sang "O Mio Babbino Caro" because I was like, wow, I just need to do this. I've done classical here and there over the years. I won the American Traditions competition, which you have to sing opera and musical theater and jazz and soul and blues and American folk song. And then Dan has arranged…my husband, Dan Pugach is also Grammy winning jazz composer and arranger. And he arranged Chick Corea's Crystal Silence in my operatic register. So, we do that sometimes with me singing classical voice over a jazz big band.
John Bommarito: So, you haven't abandoned it. That's great.
Nicole Zuraitis: Yeah, it's pretty cool.
John Bommarito: This friend of mine says if you have the ability to do it you probably should do it and that's one of those things that I had to appreciate because I can't do either. I can’t sing as well as either one of you so I just admire those who are bringing the goodness into the world like that.
Nicole Zuraitis: Well, we appreciate it.
John Bommarito: It seems like New York's jazz scene might be the only place to break out of these days. I don't know if that's true or not. You said you've never been to the Ann Arbor area, but are you familiar with any of the Ann Arbor or Michigan jazz artists? Have you encountered any along your travels?
Nicole Zuraitis: Well, I mean, my bass player, Sam Weber, went to University of Michigan. Kalamazoo is where he's from. But other than that, I hear wonderful things. Who should I know?
John Bommarito: Well, Paul Keller, bass player, went on tour for a while with Diana Krall. We've got excellent piano player, Rick Roe is part of our background here. I mean, there's more than that. Olivia Van Goor is a vocalist I think you really should check out. I think she's got the “it” factor. She just started back to school at Michigan State University, to study under Carmen Bradford. So, I mean to me, she's has got the chops. She might be the next step, but there's just a plethora of great musicians here and I just wonder if any of them made their way into your world at any point.
Nicole Zuraitis: Yeah, I mean, I think Olivia and I are Instagram friends, so there's one step in the right direction. I think it's really important to support your fellow musician, especially singer to singer. So I'm looking forward to seeing what she does when she graduates.
John Bommarito: Absolutely. Well outside of New York City where I'm guessing your draw is best there, where is your biggest draw across the country or across the world? I guess
Nicole Zuraitis: Taiwan
John Bommarito: Really? Why do you think why do you think that is?
Nicole Zuraitis: Well, I don't know. We, we just played there in August and we played a 2000 seat national concert hall and sold it out. And it was our first time ever playing in Taiwan. So, I also have a great following in Lithuania because my last name's Lithuanian. So it's…you never know. I had no clue how we sold out Taiwan, but we did. And we just had the most amazing time. We love the people. And it is the most stunning theater. No one really knows what the formula is sometimes to fill a place. I've never played in Ann Arbor, so I hope that people take a chance and, you know, want to come see some human-made jazz singer-songwriter music.
John Bommarito: I support that.
Song sample: “Wish I Could Love You”
John Bommarito: Nicole Zuraitis is my guest on The Song Break on 89.1 WEMU. Going back a little bit again, you began to spread the word, so to speak, with your debut album in 2008. It was full of great American Songbook standards, but it didn't get quite as much attention as your Grammy winner 14 years later, full of originals, How Love Begins. How validating was that for you that that record got more attention than one full of familiar songs?
Nicole Zuraitis: Well, first of all, that first record, I even took it off the streaming platforms because I was like, “Oh my gosh, it's so embarrassing” because I wasn't a fully baked cake and, you know, I had lots of batter, lots of ideas, but definitely not baked. So, I think I kind of grew up. I was a little bit of a late bloomer to jazz. You know, came to a little bit later and so I learned the language of jazz and the tradition of jazz by being in the trenches in New York City. And so, by the time How Love Begins came out, that cake that I had been, you know, like...
John Bommarito: I'm getting hungry, Nicole. Stop this!
Nicole Zuraitis: I know. It started to be actually like a pretty decent cake that people were like, “Oh, I would pick up what she's putting down over there.” So yeah, it was validating. And no matter how many times I sang the Great American Songbook, I was like, I can't do this better than Ella.
John Bommarito: Right. That’s true.
Nicole Zuraitis: I was just like, “I gotta do something else.”
Song sample: “Wish I Could Love You”
Nicole Zuraitis: So I just started writing my own music and it's been so beautiful to see, to kind of break through the barrier. So, at first it wasn't really welcomed.. And now I started something called the Modern Songbook Society, which brings together jazz singer-songwriters and jazz singers so that we can support living songwriters in jazz, not just people who are beautiful interpreters of song.
John Bommarito: That was actually one of my future questions and so I'll jump there anyway. You don't listen to the program because you don't listen to this radio station, I'm sure, on a regular basis, but the premise for this program was the Great American Songbook meets the modern day songbook. And I didn't really know how to define what that second half was because we don't define it, right? It was an idea that was sort of thrown at me by our music director at the time. So I've been trying to decide “what is the modern day song book?”. And my criteria ends up being, how often does that song get covered? Whether it's a Beatles song, a James Taylor song, or a Sting song or whatever. That to me makes it a standard in today's measurements, as opposed to the obviously The Great American Songbook is a defined period of time with defined songwriters. Is that essentially what you're doing with your Modern Songbook Society is trying to decide what is the modern songbook?
Nicole Zuraitis: Yeah, I mean, for example, Ella Fitzgerald has this recording where she's playing with a big band and I don't know what year it was, but you hear her at the beginning of the recording go, “well, this is a brand new song and I think it's going to be a great standard, a great hit, and it's gonna be one of the most amazing standards of all time.” And it was “You've Got a Friend” by Carole King. So…
John Bommarito: She was right.
Nicole Zuraitis: I was like, oh, she nailed it. Yeah. So, yeah, I think... When I played a lot of weddings in New York for, you know, 15 years, I kind of got under my belt what songs stick and stand the test of time. And for me, Modern Songbook Society… everybody's trying to write the hit that stands the test of the time, but for me it's actually just more about community within jazz and embracing the modern day song composers in jazz, as opposed to just embracing the interpreter of song, of the Great American Songbook. So, the Modern Songbook Society is super inclusive. You know, it could be red, white, green, orange, purple. We don't care. We're just looking for people who are writing music inspired by the language of jazz and hopefully get people to write together. Hopefully get people to cover each other's songs. And then hopefully, you know, the more great minds together might make more Standards that do stand the test of time.
Song sample: “It Never Goes Away”
John Bommarito: Well, this might be a tough question, because if you asked me the same question, I would be hard-pressed to answer, but I'll ask anyway. Name some perfect songs from this modern song book that you're referring to. Some songs that you think are essential from this second half of the music world.
Nicole Zuraitis: Ooh, from the second half.
John Bommarito: Well, you know, the modern songbook that you're defining with your society.
Nicole Zuraitis: “From the Start” – Laufey
Song Sample: “From the Start” – Laufey
Nicole Zuraitis: Norah Jones “Don't Know Why” Well, she didn't write that, it's Jesse Harris.
Song Sample: Norah Jones “Don't Know Why”
Nicole Zuraitis: Vilray wrote a song, he writes plenty of songs, but one of them is, that just went viral, it's called “Indifference.”
John Bommarito: Yeah, from the new EP. I connected with that song pretty quickly. I was like, “Oh, I know what he's feeling.”
Song Sample: Vilray – “Indifference”
Nicole Zuraitis: Gregory Porter's “1960 What”
Song Sample: Gregory Porter - “1960 What”
Nicole Zuraitis: I think that if we can start embracing the people who are writing that are alive and well then I think we give a chance for songwriters to move the needle and fight against the robots which they're just..yeah.
John Bommarito: My guest today on The Song Break, Nicole Zuraitis is playing the Blue LLama Jazz Club tomorrow, September 23rd. She's got a new album out called "The Devil I Knew," and to me it has some familiar elements of jazz, but it also strays kind of to the right and left of jazz. Tell me about the five chapters that this album has broken up into, if you can summarize.
Nicole Zuraitis: I actually want to put you on the spot. So, this is why I call it modern song book, because it's not just… if we were to only write songs in the style of like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, then, you know, we're just imitating that, but we're Americans or we're people who have been alive and so music has changed and black American music has influenced everything. So, I grew up listening to rock, pop, soul, blues. R&B, rock, death metal, you know, all that stuff and so that influences me as a songwriter. So that to me is what Modern Songbook is. It's like what if you, unless you grew up under a rock
John Bommarito: Right? You were hearing that.
Nicole Zuraitis: As long as you…the basis of it is learning the language of jazz. That to me, is what is the root of it and Black American music. But after that, you know. So, I want to know what influences you here in The Devil I Knew besides jazz.
John Bommarito: That is hard to answer. It's just as you listen to the record, it is not strictly a jazz record, which is absolutely fine. There's another record that's out that I'm supporting because I like it a lot. Leslie Vincent’s latest record. It doesn't. It is not a strictly a jazz record at all, but it has elements of the singer-songwriter thing, which is a second or first love of mine
Nicole Zuraitis: Modern songbook! Yeah, Leslie's another perfect example of modern songbook.
John Bommarito: Yep, absolutely, but yeah, it just doesn't feel like a jazz record necessarily. It is a jazz record at times but then another time… like the spoken word stuff. What inspired you to do spoken word interludes on this record? Is there a particular album that you heard as a as a child that made you go? I want to do that someday.
Nicole Zuraitis: I love poetry. I'm trying to figure out how to show proof of concept against the threat of AI. And so I use intergenerational voices of women from obviously way before the robots, just to show that the concept that I came up with, which is the women can sometimes be the villain in the story as opposed to just like the victim or the hero. I was looking for voices that were talking about that 100 years ago. So those poems are famous poets talking about self-reckoning and holding yourself accountable and the five chapters are kind of like the five stages of grief as you deal with your own decisions that you made.
John Bommarito: They're not necessarily personal experience for this particular record, just thinking about those experiences in general and writing about them.
Nicole Zuraitis: Right, some of them are very personal. Some of them I co-wrote, some of them, I wrote after I started realizing, “ooh, this narrative is kind of interesting, and I could lean in here.” Like I have merch that says, “ support women's wrongs.”
John Bommarito: I love it.
Nicole Zuraitis: I was like, “let me go, let me lean in hard to like my witchy over 40 era.” So that's where we are, The Devil I Knew. People are like, “oh who's it about?” I'm like, “it's about me. I am the devil!”
John Bommarito: Well, nice to meet you, I've be waiting for this.
Nicole Zuraitis: Yeah, you’re welcome.
John Bommarito: I knew you were coming for me
Nicole Zuraitis: She’s pretty nice, right? Actually.
John Bommarito: Yeah, I mean, I'm blown away a little bit. So, there's on this record one song you didn't write. You've got a previously unreleased song by Walter Becker and Larry Klein. How did you get a hold of that?
Nicole Zuraitis: Well Larry produced the record and you know when I was showing him all the songs that I'd written and arranged he was like “We need a little levity in this Nicole. It's pretty dark” and I was like, “Yeah, well, that's where I feel.That's what I'm living right now.” He's like “Well I have this song that I wrote with Walter Becker from Steely Dan and it was never recorded.” And he showed it to me and I was like “Ugh. I don't know. It’s too happy.” So then as the narrative kind of expanded I was like “You know what actually…the lyric is, let us hang like there's no tomorrow, you know, because the world's freaking falling apart, so let's throw back a couple glasses of wine and enjoy each other's company. And I was like, well, that actually kind of fits in the narrative of the record.
Song Sample: “Let Us Hang”
Nicole Zuraitis: I'm super honored that they had me record that.
John Bommarito: That is pretty cool.
Nicole Zuraitis: And Larry's playing bass on it.
John Bommarito: What a deal. Looks good on the resume for sure.
Nicole Zuraitis: Yeah, it doesn't suck.
John Bommarito: Somebody who's got a pretty impressive resume is making another appearance on one of your records, Christian McBride, who hosts Jazz Night in America, which we carry here on the station. How was it working with Christian again? I know you worked with him in the past.
Nicole Zuraitis: Oh that was… it's always great.He's so positive.He's such a beautiful player and they even did a feature on Jazz Night in America on The Devil I Knew which I really appreciated. He narrated my narrations with the spoken word they put all the poems in Jazz Night in America so I was just like “Yeah!” You know so many people said oh “why are you doing the spoken-word thing? Yada yada yada. Why is it 20 tracks? It's too long.” I'm like, “I don't care.” I just, the job as an artist is to disrupt and the job of the artist is just to experiment. And so, I was like, I feel like putting these poems, backed by Gilad Hekselman playing guitar or Andromeda Turre playing crystal bowls. Like, why not? Why not? And so, you know, Christian obviously comes in, crushes it on the bass and is just a joy to be around. So I'm really grateful that we're friends.
John Bommarito: And he has a great voice for radio, too, as it turns out.
Nicole Zuraitis: Yeah, very unique voice.
John Bommarito: It's great. I don't know that this factors into much of your planning for your records when you put out something like this, but you had a pretty good streak going with the Grammy nods and wins and things like that. Did you think about whether this would be another record that the Grammy Academy would go, “Oh, another brilliant record.” I don’t know that you think about those things when you're recording or writing.
Nicole Zuraitis: We don't do it when we're writing or recording. I mean, now it's definitely FYC season, which means that, you know, you would hope that maybe people who are in the Recording Academy would consider supporting the album because they think it's worthy of a Grammy.It would be a dream to get a nomination for this again and who knows, you now, maybe even win, but we don't write with that in mind. For example, like Live at Vic’s last year, I made that live record in Vegas with zero thought about Grammys and then it got nominated for two Grammys.And I was like “Oh, that's interesting as long as you just make the art sometimes you get lucky.” You put the work in, so fingers crossed. I would be really, really, really honored if I got through this year.
John Bommarito: Good luck, I hope that it does and I hope you do well again, deservedly so, of course.
Nicole Zuraitis: Oh, thanks, John. From your mouth to God's ear.
John Bommarito: Playing the Blue Llama Jazz Club tomorrow night, September 23rd. Nicole' Zuraitis. One final question, then I'll let you get back to your day. You happen to share the initials with a country that I don't know that you've played. Have you played New Zealand?
Nicole Zuraitis: No but that's actually on my list and you know if I was a billionaire I guess I would be building my bunker in New Zealand, but maybe they'll let me in because I’ve got the same initials.
John Bommarito: Seems like an easy tour name, NZ in NZ, right? I mean, it's just, it's right there!
Nicole Zuraitis: Well, I wanted to go by Nicole Z as my artist name, but then Rachel Z, the piano player who's a friend of mine, was like, “don't you dare.”
John Bommarito: Sometimes I do worry when we get artist’s new records and I don't know how to say their name, or whether I'm saying it right. You haven't corrected me yet, so hopefully I've been saying it right the whole time.
Nicole Zuraitis: Zuraitis
John Bommarito: All right, great well Nicole, congratulations on a great new record and I hope we've helped you bring out some folks to the Blue Llama Jazz Club. We're gonna play another song from the record right now and get back to The Song Break. Thanks for joining me today.
Nicole Zuraitis: Thanks, John. I'm looking forward to seeing you at the show, hopefully.
John Bommarito: Sounds great. Take care.
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