The two-time Grammy-winning jazz vocalist and composer trained as an opera singer, chose jazz because it paid, and made The Devil I Knew — a 20-track concept album about accountability, released in five chapters and built on the poetry of real women — entirely on her own terms.
At a glance
Who: Nicole Zuraitis — jazz vocalist, composer, pianist, arranger and producer. Born in Waterbury, Connecticut; a fixture of New York's jazz scene.
Training: Classically trained voice; B.M. in music from New York University; jazz education at Litchfield Jazz Camp.
Known for: Genre-crossing "Modern Songbook" — jazz built on storytelling and original songwriting.
Latest album: The Devil I Knew (2026) — a 20-track concept album in five chapters, produced by Larry Klein, released independently.
Key collaborators: Producer Larry Klein; Christian McBride, Donny McCaslin, Gilad Hekselman, Larry Goldings and Jon Cowherd; her husband, drummer and composer Dan Pugach.
Recognition: Two-time Grammy winner — Best Jazz Vocal Album (2024) for How Love Begins (Outside In Music); Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album (2025) for Bianca Reimagined: Music for Paws and Persistence (Dan Pugach Big Band; featured artist and co-producer).
Up next: A collaborative album under her Modern Songbook Society banner.
Nicole Zuraitis is a two-time Grammy-winning jazz vocalist, composer and pianist who has spent her career doing the one thing she was trained not to do: change the melody. Classically schooled at New York University and steeped in the discipline of healthy vocal technique, she left opera for jazz, then refused to sit inside the standards, writing her own material instead. That instinct — she calls herself, without much affection for the trait, a "disruptor" — runs straight through her new album, The Devil I Knew: a 20-track, five-chapter meditation on accountability that she conceived, produced with Larry Klein and released on her own terms, a stand against a music industry she believes is being buried under "thoughtless, computer-generated trash."
Why an opera-trained singer became a jazz artist
"My fate is to constantly be the disruptor in whatever industry I'm in — which is not one I recommend people follow," Zuraitis says. In opera, that meant hearing alternate melodies where none were invited. "I kept wanting to improvise the melodies, and that's sacrilegious." Jazz gave her room to do exactly that, and she promptly made it harder on herself by writing all her own music rather than interpreting the songbook.
The switch was also, she admits with a laugh, a financial decision. When a mentor pressed her to choose a lane — jazz singer or opera singer — her answer was blunt: "What pays me immediately? Jazz. Because I sure as hell am not making any money in classical music." But the classical foundation never left. The vocal training she received as a teenager, built entirely around healthy singing, is why she can perform seven nights in a row at full power. "Classical voice training completely made my career what it is."
What "Modern Songbook" means
Being a jazz singer-songwriter, Zuraitis says, is "one of the hardest things you can do, because nobody wants to hear stuff they don't recognize." Her answer is to reframe the listening itself. "I'm trying to train audiences to think of songs like books," she says. "You don't know what's coming on the next page. Use your imagination, listen to the lyric, hang in there. Not every book is a New York Times bestseller." She built an initiative — Modern Songbook Society — around exactly that premise: jazz centered on storytelling and songwriting rather than familiarity.
What a Grammy actually changed
In 2024, Zuraitis won her first Grammy, Best Jazz Vocal Album for How Love Begins. Ask her what it changed, and she reaches for an unglamorous metaphor. "We consider it a golden crowbar," she says. "It's not a golden key that opened every door." The major-label offers she expected never came. What did arrive was a team — booking agents across the United States, Asia and Europe — after two decades of hustling gigs alone. And a hard-won reframe of her own worth: an industry figure told her the award "wasn't a miracle, it was merit."
That distinction reset how she thinks about the business. "Why do I need a big loan from a label?" she asks. "I can get private funders who believe in the art — and we can probably do it better." It is less a grievance than a strategy, and it is the engine behind everything about her latest record.
Inside The Devil I Knew
The album began with a sentence a friend said to her: "I realized that I was the villain in his story." Zuraitis was struck by it. "That's what I want to write about," she recalls thinking. The result sounds, on its surface, like a breakup album. It isn't. "It's actually a reckoning with your own choices," she says — an examination of accountability that asks, in the album's own framing, what if the devil you knew was you.
Produced by four-time Grammy winner Larry Klein and featuring bassist Christian McBride, saxophonist Donny McCaslin and guitarist Gilad Hekselman, the record runs 20 tracks across five chapters — "the mirror," "the martyr," "the malediction," "the reckoning" and "the requiem" — each threaded with poem interludes. The idea arrived through a haunting Sylvia Plath poem and grew into a search for intergenerational women's voices; the finished album sets verse by Dorothy Parker, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale and others. Its most personal songs draw on real grief and loss, including one, "All That's Left," that comes from an experience Zuraitis has spoken about only obliquely. She frames the decision to release it as a duty. "It's my job as the artist to advocate and be the voice for people who needed to hear that others are having similar heartbreaking experiences."
Releasing an album in chapters — and taking a stand against AI
Rather than drop The Devil I Knew all at once, Zuraitis rolled it out chapter by chapter, each with its own cover art. "No one's ever really done that," she says — and it caused some cheerful confusion. "I ended up confusing the daylights out of people. DownBeat said they were reviewing three of my EPs. I had to say, no — it's an album."
The unconventional rollout is inseparable from a conviction. As streaming fills with music she describes as "thoughtless, computer-generated trash," Zuraitis made a deliberately human object: 20 tracks built on poems by real women, "definitely from before AI, as proof of concept. These are actual people." Each chapter also became, in her telling, its own visual universe — a way to make months of promotion feel like creation rather than obligation. Her rule for artists is simple: keep the eyes on the project. "The biggest mistake artists make is they announce the album, and once it's out — 'cool, it's out.' No. For the next six months I'm only talking about these songs."
Her advice to artists: it just has to be done
For all her ambition, Zuraitis's counsel to younger musicians is almost anti-perfectionist. "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be done," she says. "Perfectionism is the demise of an artist." A release, in her framing, is not a monument but a snapshot: "Every time you release music, it's a blueprint of you as an artist at that moment. You don't exist if you don't release the music." She has made a dozen albums, several as a leader, and watched most go un-playlisted — and she counts that as beside the point. "You're building a catalog. That's your proof that you're doing the thing. You have to do it yourself."
What success looks like now
Success, for Zuraitis, is no longer the award. It is full rooms in countries she has never played, and the listener who tells her a song made them cry. "That means it's not mine anymore — it's theirs," she says. "I did my job." Pressed on what she still wants, she is disarmingly honest: more passive income, less travel, more time at home with the dog and with Dan. And the through-line she would leave any artist with is the same one that started her career. "Rules are meant to be broken, as long as you're not hurting anybody. Your imagination is your strongest tool."
Watch the full conversation with Nicole Zuraitis on Classical Post, and hear The Devil I Knew in full.
Frequently asked questions
Did Nicole Zuraitis train as an opera singer?
Yes. Zuraitis was classically trained in voice and studied music at New York University before moving into jazz, where she works as a singer, songwriter and pianist. She credits her classical technique with sustaining her voice across demanding performance schedules.
What is Nicole Zuraitis's album The Devil I Knew about?
It is a 20-track concept album about accountability and self-reckoning — framed around the question "what if the devil you knew was you?" — released in five chapters and produced by Larry Klein, with poem interludes drawn from women poets including Dorothy Parker, Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
How many Grammys has Nicole Zuraitis won?
Two. She won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album for How Love Begins and the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album for Bianca Reimagined: Music for Paws and Persistence, the Dan Pugach Big Band album she co-produced and is featured on.
