Nicole Zuraitis Is Releasing “The Devil I Knew” in Five Parts

In 2024 Nicole Zuraitis won the Grammy for best vocal jazz album — with a record of nothing but her own songs. In a field where most prizes are built on standards written by dead men, that is unusual enough to be worth a sentence. The new work, “The Devil I Knew”, is a five-part opus that arrives not all at once but in segments, spread across the year.

Larry Klein produced. Vince Mendoza wrote the string arrangements, Jerry Hey the horns. The personnel reads more like a festival bill than a credit list: Christian McBride and Sam Weber on bass, Jon Cowherd, Larry Goldings and David Cook on piano and keys, Donny McCaslin on tenor, Scott Sharrard, Idan Morim and Gilad Hekselman on guitars, Dan Pugach on drums, Andromeda Turre on vocals.

The styles turn over every few tracks. “Call My Name (I Dare You)” runs on Nashville logic, organ and guitar. “Vice, Versus” is late-night. She struts through “Let Us Hang”, plays it blue on “He’s A Demon”, and floats over strings on “I Get Along Without You Very Well”. On “The Martyr”, McCaslin answers her.

Between her own lyrics she sets poems by Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker and Sara Teasdale. They provide a breath between her own arguments. Reviewer George W. Harris pauses here: after the strings, horns and three keyboard players, he writes that he wants a separate album — or a concert — with only Zuraitis, a piano and those poems.

Harris’s wish does not dismiss the album. It identifies its sharpest contrast: the large arrangements display Zuraitis’s ambition, while a voice and piano reveal her control. Sometimes the centre of the busiest record is the place with the fewest people in it.