Nicole Zuraitis: The Up and Down and Up Journey to Newport

Nicole Zuraitis should receive a Grammy Award just for her laugh! It's deep, loud, energetic and a treat to hear. Not taking herself too seriously, her conversation is peppered with laughter while she talks about the high and lows of her travels from a struggling young jazz vocalist/composer to her surprising (to her) Grammy win. Her career started as a young jazz singer with a community college big band and at the Litchfield Jazz Camp. She performed opera for a while after college graduation but eventually turned back to jazz. Zuraitis has appeared at Lincoln Center, Blue Note Jazz Club, Carlyle Hotel and many more. Winner of the 2016 Coffee Music Project New York Songwriting Project, and the 2015 runner up in the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, winner of the IMEA Best Jazz Album Award, the Johnny Mercer Award in the American Traditions Competition, and too many more than there is space to list them all. All About Jazz was able to spend a little time with her at the Newport Jazz Festival.

All About Jazz: Nicole, so nice to meet and be able to talk for little while.

Nicole Zuraitis: Thank you, nice to meet you as well. Thank you for wanting to talk with me. (then the laugh!)

AAJ: Why don't you just take us back to the beginning until we end up here in Newport.

Nicole Zuraitis: My parents love music but they're not musicians. I had a strolling accordionist on my Italian side and my great uncle was a conductor in Lithuania, but no one directly around me was a musician. So, I guess you could say music chose me, I wasn't born into it. It chose me at a young age.

The thing that's really wild to me is that I'm here in Newport when just a year ago I was really, really struggling with whether I should keep going. Why? How will anyone ever pay attention to me?

My achilles heel has always been that I love all genres of music and I played and sang them all—sort of a "jack of all trades but master of none." So from last year to this year has been the biggest full circle ever, and now I get to talk to you and say my biggest takeaway is that I'm so honored, grateful, and amazed at (starts to sing) what a difference a year makes.

It was a wild, wild journey and many, many times I said, "I don't think I can do this anymore." I just felt like I was beating my head against the wall. I didn't know how many more no's I could get, I didn't know how many more rejections I could take.

The thing that blows my mind is that people weren't rejecting me because they didn't like me. They were like, "I've never heard of you." I just realized that if you didn't have a ton of money and you didn't go viral, they were just not going to pull you out of a hat.

There's just a wealth of incredible time spent, so I don't know. This is the first time I've felt seen in 20 years.

AAJ: When you started performing was it through singing?

NZ: I just loved to sing, music was the only thing that came easy to me my entire life. I used to play trombone, I tried to take piano lessons but I was too stubborn and I had a really hard time reading music when I could just hear it, so I played everything by ear. I had a really big voice and I wanted to sing like Whitney Houston but my voice was so big the next logical thing was to go to classical. So I was playing the trombone in a jazz band and transcribing Ella Fitzgerald solos and also trying to be Mariah Carey while listening to Led Zepplin and wanting to be a professional soccer and tennis player. All in all I was a pretty strange kid. By some weird force I kept singing jazz on the side lines but was still pursuing classical voice because I was naturally excelling there. It was too confining for me, I really like the improvisatory nature of jazz and so after I graduated from college I went to Europe and just galavanted around. I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I started waiting tables and somebody offered me a gig sitting in the back of an Italian joint in Waterbury Conn. singing standards. Well, I know standards and I had been shadowing Sheila Jordan, Kevin Mahogany, Stephanie Nakasian, and spending years as a teaching assistant at the Litchfield Jazz Camp, I knew the standards. Next thing I know I meet the head of the jazz camp and she says "You should be singing jazz." So, "jack of all trades master of none" me made this terrible jazz album before I was ready. I had nothing to say but it was adorable. Next thing you know it's 2008 and I'm a freakin' jazz singer, but I didn't know the language yet. It took me a long time to study the language and I was hyper aware of the fact that I really needed to dive into the tradition. I would nervously not sit in jam sessions but I would go and listen. I wouldn't put myself out there because I had a lot of work to do. In the meantime I was paying my rent by playing at weddings but I had to teach myself how to play piano for real so I could play at weddings. But then I got an opportunity to play at the 55 Bar next to Stonewall

I started playing there once a month and that's when my songwriting began to blossom and my sound became more experimental. Again, the achilles heel was that it sat between genres. There was fusion, then there was jazz and then pop. I was almost 30 and I applied for the Herb Alpert ASCAP Young Jazz Composers Awards and I got it! It was like "Oh, validation," and I don't self validate very well. So, it was OK, maybe I can do this jazz. I applied to the Sarah Vaughan competition and I got in. I thought that's so weird because I'm not really a jazz singer yet, I'm always my biggest critic. I was a runner up in the competition and I also judged with Christian McBride but we didn't actually meet. So I was back to playing piano in restaurants and one night Christian McBride walks in after a recording session and recognizes me. He told me I sounded great, we became friends

Then I traveled with a folk band, my husband and I hadn't met yet. I was doing a lot of fusion and it's such a long story but the bottom line is in early 2017 I went to Birdland to sit at a open mic. I sang dead last and I sang "The Nearness of You" by myself and when I got off the stage someone said "You're suppose to sing an up tempo song," and I was like jazz hates me! (hearty laugh) I just quit! All of a sudden Gianni Valenti (owner of Birdland) comes up to me and says' "Where the heck have you been? You're going to start singing with the Birdland Big Band." So, now I'm singing with the band, my husband (drummer Dan Pugach) and I make an arrangement of "Jolene" which was Grammy nominated. That was the external validation I needed again to tell me okay, you can do this thing. Things were going really well then the pandemic hit and everything came to a stop. Then 2021 Christian had always said we should do something and I said it's time baby, let's do it. So we made the record and I shopped it around—but I'm not Tik Tok famous. It's really difficult to find some one who will invest in you, you have to invest in yourself. I found a little boutique label to release it and the next thing you know we won a grammy! (another hearty laugh). It has nothing to do with your followers, nothing to do with what you've released previously, nothing to do with you as a person, it has to do with the actual recording. My peers voted and I was in this strong competition but I guess it was a time when I was really being seen.

AAJ: You're on the festival circuit now?

NZ: Yeah, we're playing the Stowe Festival this weekend, we've got festivals coming up in Croatia, Austrailia, White Plains, Lake George, I'm really hoping we break big into the festival market this year.

AAJ: What comes first, the music or the lyrics?

NZ: It used to be music first, but now that I'm older, I understand the importance of a story. Lyrics, and it's funny as I listen to the older lyrics I wrote I know I can do better. I've already written a new record which is very lyric centric. You know, the older you get the more story you have to tell, right? So yeah, I think I have quite a story to tell now. I'm 40 years old!

AAJ: You perform a mix of standards plus your own songs.

NZ: Oh yes, I still sing with the Birdland Big Band, I have a project called the "Siren Songs" which are arrangements of standards by women. I'm always trying to stay in the tradition of jazz and using my chops for transcribing. As an educator my students are helping me, I'm transcribing with them. They'll bring something in and I'll be: "Oh, shoot, I want to check that out." You know it's a special thing, there's so much music to learn but good music is good music.

AAJ: Where are you teaching?

NZ: I'm teaching contemporary vocal at NYU and I'm a member of the Jazz Studies Department at SUNY Purchase. Because of all the touring and pretty unprecedented Grammy I've been wanting a sabbatical.

AAJ: Going in a completely different direction, I understand in your non-musical life you and your husband Dan foster Pit Bulls.

NZ: Oh my gosh, you know about that? I love dogs, sometimes I think I love them more than people. So Dan and I, since 2011 have been fostering pit bulls. It's something we're really passionate about. With the money I make with my records, and with Dan's big band album, "Bianca Reimagined: Music for Paws and Persistance" about his late dog we're giving money back to shelter dogs. There are millions and millions of Pit Bulls euthanized every year. They're an amazing misunderstood breed and I'm kind of misunderstood myself so maybe that underdog thing is working for me and the dogs. I'm like a Pit Bull myself, big and smooshy and misunderstood.

AAJ: Man, between writing, performing and sheltering dogs your life is more than full. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to talk to All About Jazz and I have to tell you. You've got the best laugh I've ever heard!

NZ: (laughing) Thank you so much! I hope we meet again soon.

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