Twenty tracks, and the poem is what stays

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 other people's: Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, Sara Teasdale. The poems work as connective tissue, a breath between her own arguments. And this is where the reviewer, George W. Harris, gives himself away: having heard the strings, the horns and three keyboard players, he writes that he wants a separate album — or a gig — of just her, a piano and those poems.

The remark is worth keeping because it argues against the whole build. A record like this gathers everything that could be gathered, and the thing that lands hardest is the part left unfinished. Zuraitis says something close to it from the other direction: “It's not about me. It's about what the listener hears in the end, or what they need to hear.”