Lucy Yeghiazaryan: Serious And Seriously Talented

Lucy Yeghiazaryan is one of the most compelling jazz vocalists to emerge in recent years. Especially in New York, where she regularly performs in the city's jazz clubs, audiences have been drawn to her rich, powerful tone and her ability to bring an enchanting emotional depth to every lyric.

Those qualities, along with her no-nonsense approach to classic songs and her effortless sense of swing, are behind the steady growth of Yeghiazaryan's audience.

That's impressive these days. Then add to her story the fact that she grew up in post-Soviet Armenia, a country facing many challenges. Amid those circumstances, she learned to love singing. That included her native folk music, but also American jazz, which she sang before she could speak English.

Her love of singing grew from her family's appreciation of music and the arts. Her mother ensured that music was always present in the home, while her father had a knack for finding recordings of American musicians (through methods Yeghiazaryan hints may have been somewhat surreptitious during the Soviet era) for the family to enjoy.

Her journey is still unfolding, and Yeghiazaryan has already amassed an impressive discography of consistently outstanding recordings, beginning with In Her Words in 2019. Her sixth album, Hey Love! (La Reserve, 2026), further confirms her artistry and ranks among her finest work. It is outstanding.

Yeghiazaryan is a serious artist whose music is firmly rooted in the straight-ahead jazz tradition, without relying on vocal calisthenics. Her singing hits the solar plexus, gets feet tapping and heads nodding, and speaks directly to the heart.

"I think what interests me is making good music that feels good," Yeghiazaryan says from her New York City home. "If to somebody it sounds like it's from the '60s or something, I don't actually think it necessarily does. If it sounds good, I think it's timeless. You can't really place it in any era."

Jazz is not a simple art. But Yeghiazaryan feels a simple approach can get it across to an audience with just as much impact as musicians—instrumentalists and vocalists—who may play flurries of notes when fewer would suffice.

"I find that all of us—not just in music—do too much when you're young. Because you're still kind of looking for what works and what doesn't work. So it's excusable when you're young, and it's taken a lot of work for me to sort of machete it down into something a little more clean and refined," she says. "I generally find that things that are worth listening to are always simply said. Whether that's a politician or a musician. You don't need these extended things. If you have something to say, you can usually say it in one chorus, simply sung.

"I'm singing a song that's been sung literally millions of times, so I'm just a person passing through it. It's not about me, it's the song. There's a reason the song has been around for so long. The goddamn melody is good and it works. It just works. So, why would I butcher it? I try to honor our great composers. Because the American Songbook is just so beautiful. And not just that. I love Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and that stuff too. Why would I mess with it? I try to present it in a simple but beautiful and honest way as best I can, and not worry too much about whether I'm pushing some boundary or something. That doesn't interest me so much."

As a girl in Armenia, what interested Yeghiazaryan was singing in her home with her three sisters, which was as natural as anything in her life. Her mother was committed to making sure music was a presence. In Armenia the electricity would cut out unexpectedly, and the duration of any blackout was unknown. Singing helped fill those voids and ease discomfort.

"Especially once the sun set," she says. "There was nothing else to do except sing. To me it was normal. Looking back on it now, it's abnormal. But that's all we would do, and it established this sense of community. Also it gave me a functional purpose to music, which is lost these days. I find myself on stage sometimes, and I think, 'How can I make this artificially created environment—a theater, or a club, or an opera house or wherever you're performing—how can I make this feel like we're all sitting around the hearth again?' Because I experienced music initially as that, which I think is sort of a prehistoric approach to the arts. Looking back on it as an adult, I think I had a very deep ingrained, day-to-day functional experience for music, which has been really fundamental for me."

Yeghiazaryan said that period was inspiring, "though at the time, I didn't know any different. To me, entertainment, or music, was something everyone did during day-to-day life. I think something we all forget in the modern era with electricity is how preoccupied we are with technology, and how much time that really takes up. When you literally take away anything that you use with electricity, there's a lot of time in the day, and most people end up using that time doing the necessary things. Obviously, there was a lot of manual labor involved, but aside from that, any downtime ends up being devoted to the arts."

Not knowing English was not a deterrent.

"I think not too long ago, most of the world wasn't fluent in English. So a lot of people that were listening to jazz were listening without knowing a single word. My dad was really into it and he had a couple records. I don't know how he had gotten them during the Soviet Union regime ... But whenever there was electricity, we would be listening to those. Or people would be copying recordings, random bits of recordings over cassettes and stuff. So you'd be listening to those whenever the electricity was on, and as soon as it would shut off, you tried to recreate it. Because of that, I still have sort of a very phonetic approach to music and language. I just try to recreate the sound as best I can."

For Yeghiazaryan the meaning in the lyric is not always as important as the actual sound being used to get the right rhythm. "(Rhythm) is kind of the core element of jazz music. I think that's what touches people. That's why it's so universal. You don't really need to know what the singer's saying, because the rhythm kind of dictates the mood more so.

"It is much like, for example, how many jazz fans are smitten by the music of Brazil from the bossa nova era. They love the music and the vocals of people like Eliane Elias, Ivan Lins, Elis ReginaorJoao Gilberto without understanding a word of Portuguese. "

In Armenia, she also took up the violin for a time, which turned out to be an arduous process, but something that helped her vocals. She began at the age of seven.

"Violin is extremely difficult to play. There's no frets. It's your ears deciding where the fingers go, so you need good pitch to be able to play in tune," she says. "Even though I didn't continue with it professionally, I grew up in that super strict Russian sort of system of classical music, and played pretty well up to a certain point. It helped me intonation-wise, rhythm-wise. I don't know if classical music is very helpful. I think if anything, Armenian folk music has been helpful to develop my rhythm. A lot of people from my part of the world tend to generally have a good sense of rhythm, because the folk music is so rhythmic. But violin definitely helped with intonation and pitch."

As she got older, Yeghiazaryan continued to demonstrate singing talent. Her mother pushed her to foster it. "My mother was very pushy with that, because it's hard to describe that time in the post-Soviet countries," she says. Talent was seen as a possible way of getting out of poor economic circumstances. "That's kind of the blunt, ugly side of it," she says.

With her sisters, they formed an a cappella group that appeared on some stages "where we would sing some English stuff, but mostly Armenian stuff, a more kind of religious music. Armenia has a rich history, because it's the oldest Christian nation, so there were hymns and things like that. We were always on stage, but it never got to a point where that would have been financially viable in any way. Because the country was a mess," says Yeghiazaryan. "I think the '90s saw a giant exodus of artists because you couldn't make money doing art in Armenia. So I was on stage, but none of it was very serious. When we got (to the U.S.), my mom was persistent. She made sure I was still singing, but I would say I didn't have any serious experience prior to coming to the States."

It was economic hardship that eventually forced the Yeghiazaryans to emigrate to America in 2002.

"Coming to the States is an insane experience. It really is the land of milk and honey in a sense. I remember my very first experience of walking into a supermarket completely blew my mind. The accessibility and the amount of stuff, just stuff. Capitalism at its best. Now that I've lived in it, I don't necessarily think these are good things, but for someone who kind of came from nothing, it was absolutely mind blowing.

"Nature, too. Europe's been plundered for thousands of years. The thing I love the most about America and North America is the nature. We moved into the suburbs of New Jersey and lived on this beautiful lake. And it absolutely blew my mind, just the sheer beauty of North American woods. But along with all of that, it was an unfamiliar place where the rules are as different as can be. I didn't speak any English, so it was rough. I remember my mom dropping us off at school and just leaving us. We said, 'What do you mean you're leaving?' And she was like, 'I'm sorry, I gotta go to work. You guys got to figure it out.'"

For a couple years, the girls were trying to pick up the language and figure things out. "It's not a pleasant experience. Nobody wants to leave their home. So, I have a lot of unpleasant, negative memories tied to it, but it also was an eye-opening, insane experience for me," she says.

She sought out jazz outside of the public school system. She was surprised that jazz didn't garner great respect in the country where it was born, "while the rest of the world, in a lot of places, identifies America through that music. That was really wild to me."

The family found a program called Jazz for Teens funded by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center that was a big help. And as a student at West Milford High School there were good band and choral programs. "I had a great time with that choir. So I got lucky in that regard. But as far as jazz, it was definitely Jazz for Teens that really kind of pushed me to do more with it."

There were jazz musicians from New York on the Jazz for Teens faculty, including Mike LeDonne.

"I did that for many years. You had to go every Saturday and I absolutely hated it," she says. But her mother made sure she attended. "Thank God. Those singers had a full rhythm section, so I was singing with the full rhythm section every week, which I think is what gave me the ease with a band that I have now."

As she developed, she readily heard music from more of the greats who became major influences on her style.

"I think definitely Carmen McRae more than anyone else," she says. "Also the holy trinity of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. I really like Etta Jones. But outside of singers, I like people who have big sounds. Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins, and all these big tenor players have been super influential for me too. They just have that projection. They have that big, big sound where as soon as it comes out, it feels like you're in a warm bath or something, you know? It sets you at ease in a way that I really like. I try to do that with my singing as well."

She notes, " It was only after emigrating to the States that I heard Sarah Vaughn for the first time after coming here. I heard Charlie Parker for the first time. Billie Holiday we had a couple recordings (in Armenia). But most of the singers that have been seriously influential for me, like Carmen McRae, I found much later after emigrating."

After high school, she took a completely different and unlikely turn. She attended William Patterson College in New Jersey as a jazz major, but then left that program She graduated with a degree in world history.

The music didn't leave her, however. Jazz still had a hold on the young woman.

"They have a fantastic program," she says of William Patterson's jazz agenda. "When I was there, Mulgrew Miller was there and I had a great time. The funny thing was, I quit. But I was always in the music building anyway, so I quit on paper, but I was still kind of a jazz major, you know?"

She explains, "I don't necessarily enjoy all the older components that go into being a musician, aside from the singing bit. I love singing. I don't like all the business around it. I could sense that early on. I'm not awkward, but I don't necessarily like it. I find it exhausting, and I knew I wasn't going to like that bit of the business. So I was looking for something that didn't have to deal with people so much. That's why I didn't want to go into it professionally."

She moved to New York City but couldn't find a job with her history degree.

"I had to pay rent," she says. "Because I'd been singing for a decade or so in New Jersey already, I knew people and had these connections. Mostly horn players were calling me to sub for gigs, like restaurant gigs and stuff in New York. I was desperate to pay rent, I started taking them and the ball kind of just kept rolling. It was out of desperation, honestly. I didn't necessarily seriously want to go into it, but I'd been doing it for so long that it kind of seemed like it was my only option at that point. But I've grown to love it, and to figure out ways to deal with the unpleasant bits of the business as well, where it's not overwhelming for me."

Yeghiazaryan had been doing singing gigs in New Jersey without much fanfare. Through her earliest gigs in New York she was getting encouragement.

"The level of playing is so high in New York. When you first move here, it's a big slap in your face, in a good way ... It was good for me. It was refreshing to see people do something so well. It pushed me to practice more. Getting encouragement from people that I really loved and respected as musicians was the biggest push for me. Whether that was like John O'Neill or Harold Mabern or Grant Stewart (her husband). Before I married my husband, I regarded him highly as a musician. So just seeing these people genuinely encouraged me because they liked the music, and they liked what I was going for. It was really inspiring."

She got past the point of no return, despite her distaste for the business and marketing side of things.

"When you make good music, there's there's no better high than that. I think that's what did it. It wasn't really having a better career or making more money. It was like, 'Damn, the music can get better and it feels good.' So, I think that's what did it."

For Yeghiazaryan, her rise has been gradual. "I've been unsuccessful in the stereotypical ways that a lot of singers are successful. I've never won any big competitions. I'm notoriously bad at that," she says. "The moments that were really big for me were never publicly big. I could say the first time playing with Harold Mabern, I remember I was terrified to go up. (Drummer) Joe Farnsworth knew me a little bit, so he called me up, and Harold was like, "All right, all right,' and I went up. I sang one, and after the song I was waiting on tiptoes. 'What's he gonna say?' And he said, 'I like that. Let's do another one.' And the joy, I was just like, 'Oh, thank God, he liked it,' you know? That kind of encouragement. That was big for me. So it's always these kind of quieter moments. That was at Smalls (a well known New York jazz nightspot) at some late night show. All my big experiences have been in small places. I remember specific sets of music I've played where I was like, 'Okay, that sounds like something I really like.' It was never some big 'Ah Ha' moment that was in front of the public."

Hey Love! contains standards like "Witchcraft," and "Loverman," with great swinging on "Blowtop Blues" and "Next Spring." The band is sharp and the vocals are sparkling with great energy and execution. Great phrasing and feeling throughout.

"It has gotten a very good reception. I'm a little surprised, because I think straight ahead jazz, there's nothing modern about it. But I'm really glad. I think there's generally a kind of a step back for the younger generation. They're much more interested in the straight ahead stuff now than they've ever been."

Yeghiazaryan works a lot of the clubs, but mostly weekends. She has a child now and is more selective about when she works.

"I don't want to be working too much because I have a little baby and I think it creates a little bit of demand, so it's a little bit of a business move as well. I don't want to overdo it. So things are going okay. I feel very, very lucky, because I own my own time. I choose to work when I want to work, and I don't work when I don't want to work. That to me is more important than anything. I get to raise my child. I get to live my life with my family and work weekends or fly away for a week or so, and then come back. It's ideal. I have to pinch myself. I don't know how I've gotten to this perfect kind of spot," says the singer.

"I'm in a good spot, because I think you know my personal life is in a good spot, and career will be what it will be. All I'm concerned about is making good music, so as long as I'm doing that, I'll let it take me wherever it will."