By Andrew Poretz***Jazz singer-songwriter Nicole Zuraitis and her quintet made an auspicious Dizzy’s debut with her Flipside Sessions, a compelling set of mostly original tunes. The star, who frequently plays with her trio at Birdland and regularly fronts the Birdland Big Band, has a gorgeou
s, pliable voice with a warm resonance in her lower register and a delicious sweetness in her upper register. In countless appearances, I’ve yet to hear her miss a note. She is an accomplished pianist and a fine songwriter.
The set was mainly a celebration of her upcoming album of original tunes, How Love Begins, but she also played several covers with arrangements that shattered preconceptions. The CD and digital downloads were available for prerelease sale after the concert. Interestingly, the new album is divided into two parts, “Oil” and “Water,” representing the beginning and end of a relationship.
Zuraitis provided her own piano accompaniment for much of the set. She was accompanied primarily by bassist Jonathan Michel, guitarist Gilad Hekselman, and her husband, drummer Dan Pugach. Maya Kronfeld supplied electric organ on several numbers, and took over at the Steinway when Zuraitis stood to si
ng.
The star opened with the first track from her new album,“The Good Ways,” a bluesy, almost R&B number made hotter by Kronfeld’s organ accompaniment. It would have made a great Ray Charles song.
The self-described “recovered opera singer” wrote “Actuality” with a classical underpinning in mind. Pugach’s intense drumming was essential to the tension of this unique piece, while Hekselman’s guitar solo had shades of the late Larry Coryell in his approach.
The personal, often intimate nature of her originals led Zuraitis to declare, “I’m gonna read you my diary for the next 115 minutes.”
Her cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” was Grammy-nominated for Pugach’s arrangement. It’s a somber,
dark and powerful take, nearly unrecognizable from the country classic original. Zuraitis up front, with Kronfeld at the piano, sang “Burn,” the first single from How Love Begins, with a nearly vocalese feel. “Like Dew,” a slow jazz ballad, served metaphorically as the flip side to the beginning of love.
The star performed her wonderfully witty “coffee” song, “I Like You a Latte,” the only original not on the new album. Zuraitis first came to my attention when she introduced this song at an event some years ago. Written for a competition that required using the word “coffee” in the lyric, she got a bit “carried away” with java puns and turns of phrase. She quipped, “Why do I have to be so extreme?” The song is as witty and clever as anything by, say, Dave Frishberg. It took an audience member’s query to get her to reveal that she won the competition.
While Zuraitis’ original songs stand on their own, her use of reimagined arrangements of several great tunes added greatly to the evening. A completely new take on “Pure Imagination,” the Leslie Bricusse/Anthony Newle
y classic from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was a thing of beauty that induced tears of joy.
“No matter where you go, you always have wanderlust in your heart,” she declared when introducing “Travel” from the new album; the tune is an original composition with Edna St. Vincent Millay ‘s poem “Travel” set as the lyric. The end result somehow sounds like a lost Joni Mitchell song—a good thing.
Overall, the show was a delight. The musicians have a tightness that comes from a long history of working together. In fact, Zuraitis first met bassist Jonathan Michel, she gleefully noted, on the back of a jazz camp bus when they were both teens. If you missed her Dizzy’s show, you’ll have to wait until her CD release show at Birdland in September. I’m pretty sure you will like her… a latte.
Photos by Catherine Hancock
