Nicole Zuraitis Baked Her Own Cake

Nicole Zuraitis has spent much of her career being asked (and asking herself) variations of the same question: where do you fit? Is the music 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, Jon Cowherd, Gilad Hekselman, Donny McCaslin and Christian McBride, alongside her working quartet, which includes her husband, Dan Pugach, on drums.

The conceit of the project, which is broken into five parts—The Mirror, The Martyr, The Malediction, The Reckoning and The Requiem—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. Nicole 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. It's 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.

That same instinct 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.

Nicole says she was a late bloomer. As she tells it, "I wasn't a fully baked cake until I was 37 years old. Like, 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.'"

By any conventional measure, the cake is baked. Her album How Love Begins won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2024. And yet, even after that recognition, she says she still feels like something of an outsider in the jazz business. She plays nearly 150 shows a year, mostly on the road, but remains fiercely independent and largely self-managed.

We talked recently about all of this: about her early years as a rising soccer player and the injury that led her from one kind of pitch to another, her brief stint as a trombone player, her years of hustling in New York, what it means to live a jazz life in today's music business, and how she went about creating the world of The Devil I Knew.

That same instinct 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. Nicole says she was a late bloomer. As she tells it, "I wasn't a fully baked cake until I was 37 years old. Like, 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.'"