Review: Nicole Zuraitis HOW LOVE BEGINS ALBUM RELEASE at Birdland Heartily Ovated

Let me tell you why I love jazz.  When you listen to jazz music, there is always a sense of the history of the art form.  Even as jazz has evolved over the century, even as artists in the genre have discovered and created their own sound and style, there is always a foundation from which the listener can hear and feel the origins of jazz and various varieties thereof from the last hundred years.  That doesn’t really happen with rock and roll, pop music, musical theater - as those musical sounds have grown, their sounds have changed so drastically that often there is no discernible history in the music, and that’s fine because evolution is essential.  That cannot be said of either jazz or country - their roots are always showing.

Let me tell you why I love Birdland.  The venerated jazz club has not been shy about bringing new artists and new sounds to the stages where are presented big band, swing, Latin jazz, Bossa Nova, Ragtime, instrumental, vocal, or any other style of jazz.  The Birdland modus operandi appears to be one that welcomes all artists making music under the jazz umbrella.

At her album release concert on September 4th, Nicole Zuraitis demonstrated that she, like Birdland, is interested in honoring the history of jazz, all the while developing her own more modern style of the century-old art form.

HOW LOVE BEGINS was released on July 7th of this year and has been getting rave reviews, and deservedly so, because it is a bold and interestingly themed album of all original music by Zuraitis herself, and even though calling up the album on your streaming platform (or buying the disc and playing it at home) is an audible feast of love, being in a room with Nicole Zuraitis and hearing her sing the music is more than a feast, it is a hedonistic orgy of pleasure.  With a cast of some of the greatest musicians in the industry (Christian McBride, come on, now!) on the Birdland stage, her ebullient personality, these compositions right out of her own mind, and that voice, that once-in-a-lifetime voice, Nicole Zuraitis took her audience on a musical ride that was at equal times provocative, hilarious, sexy, sassy, and always (very strangely) with both feet on the ground.  It is very easy to listen to Nicole Zuraitis talk in between musical numbers.  There is a total lack of pretense or coyness and always a welcoming air of benevolence – you know, not all artists have that gift.  There are those with a self-consciousness that prevents them from dropping the fourth-wall curtain, causing an aloofness that prevents the audience from really getting in.  Not Nicole.  A warmer, more affable onstage hostess might come along, but Zuraitis is special. 

And then she begins to sing.  And then she begins to play.  And the result is electric.

For nearly eighty minutes on Monday night, Zuraitis presented to a room full of some of the best musicians in the industry (she called them out with praise and gratitude, more than once) twelve entries in her musical catalogue, ten of them from HOW LOVE BEINGS and two of them covers, a riveting rendition of Nina Simone’s “Do I Move You?” and a hypnotic “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” that was a last-minute addition, even a surprise to the other members of the band.  Those covers were wonderful, welcome additions to the program because, let’s face it, as an audience member you always want to hear something with which you already have a relationship - it makes the experience more personal.  But two was enough because Zuraitis has written and recorded an exceptional set of songs on this new album, and the music industry is desperate for new material.  Heaven bless the songwriters who bring to the singers and the audiences new stories.  The Great American Songbook is great.  We love all those decades-old songs by long-dead composers and we will always enjoy hearing them.  But, as stated above, evolution is essential, and Nicole Zuraitis has written lyrics so poetic as to, at times, become esoteric, and melodies of such intricate musical vocabulary as to make a person lean forward in their seat, waiting to see where the melodic line will, next, take them.  The performance of “Reverie” (based on a piece by Debussy) is modern jazz personified.  Like a one-two-three punch, Zuraitis and guitarist Gilad Hekselman created an exploratory dialogue with “Let Me Love You,” guest guitarist Idan Morim assisted the band on the thunderstorm-like “Travel” (born from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay), and Mr. McBride joined Ms. Zuraitis for the suggestive and sultry “The Coffee Song (I Like You A Latte)” which was just released as an EP.  The entire evening was like an Olympic event, a relay race, if you will, with every new entry upping the ante and building the most delicious tension to the penultimate tour-de-force number “Burn,” leaving the audience in need of an appropriate metaphysical cigarette.  Just listening to the music is satisfying enough, but there is a thrill unparalleled that cannot be captured by the ears, that must be achieved through the simultaneous experience of watching the McBride fingers fly over the strings while hearing the sounds those fingers create, by hearing the brilliant beats of Dan Pugach’s sticks on the skins, live and in person, by seeing how laidback are Miki Hayama and Hekselman on (respectively) organ and guitar, while issuing forth mind-altering music, by seeing the appreciative expressions on the faces of the other musicians during Sam Weber’s bass solos, and by observing the individual styles of Morim and Hekselman, as they switch off on guitar.  And, there, leading the charge is the Janis Joplin of Jazz, Nicole Zuraitis, whose proficiency as musician and vocalist may not be matched by, but is enhanced by, the physical change that comes over her body when she is performing.  There is an eloquence to her hands as she plays the air in place of her vocal cords, and her entire body as, like a sequin-bedecked rock star, she throws herself into the piano playing, constantly engaged in an act of fully-invested storytelling in song, be it dramatic, humorous, or any other emotion one might care to nominate.   Like the modern-day jazz that Zuraitis is creating, her live shows are a thing of wonder, and when one gets a chance to see her and her merry band of miraculous music makers play out, the opportunity must be seized, or regret will follow.  In the meantime, everyone will have to make do with the album HOW LOVE BEGINS which, unless this writer is very much mistaken, should most definitely get Nicole Zuraitis another trip back to the Grammys.

Visit the Nicole Zuraitis website HERE.

THIS is the Christian McBride website.

Miki Hayama’s website is accessible HERE.

Gilad Hekselman has an internet presence HERE.

THIS is the link to the Idan Morim website.

Dan Pugach has a website HERE.

Sam Weber has his website HERE.

Find great shows to see on the Birdland website HERE.

Photos by Stephen Mosher

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