Sound Pathways with Karen Olson Ph.D.

Finding Her Voice: Jazz, The Devil I Knew, and the Ladder to Dreams with Nicole Zuraitis

Two-time Grammy winner Nicole Zuraitis joins Dr. Karen Olson to trace her path from a shy childhood singer to a celebrated jazz artist, talking about her new album The Devil I Knew, her marriage to drummer Dan Pugach, and her advocacy for musicians and rescue animals.

Welcome and a Warm Introduction
Dr. Karen Olson opens Sound Pathways by dedicating the episode to her late mother, Dorothy Olson, and welcoming two-time Grammy winner and six-time nominee Nicole Zuraitis as her guest. Olson describes Zuraitis as a singer-songwriter, arranger, producer, bandleader and advocate who is shaping a modern songbook within jazz, and she speaks with emotion about witnessing Zuraitis’s artistry firsthand, especially on her new album, The Devil I Knew. She calls the record deep, intricate and original, admitting she wants to keep learning from it. Zuraitis, visibly moved, jokes that Olson is making her cry before the conversation even begins, and the two quickly settle into what they call a mutual admiration society. Olson notes the wonder of Zuraitis’s constantly touring life, connecting it playfully to the show’s own theme of sound pathways, before asking her guest to take listeners back to the very beginning of her musical life.

Finding Her Voice
Zuraitis explains that her parents first noticed her singing harmony to the television before she could hold a full conversation, even though no one else in the family was a musician. She was too shy to perform for them directly and sang only alone until she was eleven, when she surprised everyone at a school talent show with a recorded piano track of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina from Evita. She wanted to sing Whitney Houston but says she simply did not yet have the voice for it. From there she moved through classical voice training, opera and trombone before jazz found her again after college, when she realized she wanted to create rather than only interpret. Learning the language and tradition of jazz took roughly six years, and she says she did not feel she had anything genuine to say as a jazz artist until she was twenty-nine, calling herself, cheerfully, a late bloomer.

Making Her Own Spoon
Olson reflects on the unseen years of practice rooms and rejection behind any artist’s polish, and Zuraitis agrees, warning young musicians against expecting instant stardom. She says there was no silver spoon handed to her, so she had to make her own spoon through years of searching. The turning point came when her husband, Grammy-winning drummer and composer Dan Pugach, urged her to apply for a Herb Alpert Young Jazz ASCAP Award just before she turned thirty, despite her own doubts about being a real jazz singer. Winning it, followed later by recognition in the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, began chipping away at her imposter syndrome. During those years she also built a songwriting practice through residencies at New York rooms including the 55 Bar, Rockwood, Toshi’s Living Room and the Sugar Bar, playing original material for live audiences and treating each gig as a gift rather than an obligation.

Stages, Crowds, and Why She Sings
Olson shares her own history playing in an Atlantic City house band behind Rat Pack headliners including Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and later performing with the New York Pops, prompting a conversation about what it is like to move between electric full houses and quieter, less attentive rooms. Zuraitis describes selling out a two-thousand-seat theater in Taiwan she never expected to visit, while struggling to fill a small California venue, and says touring keeps teaching her to adjust and keep growing. Asked why she chose music as a career, she traces it to watching the towers fall on 9/11 as a high school sophomore and then watching the Concert for New York soon after, in tears, realizing that music was helping people move through grief. That moment convinced her she wanted to be the person someone needs when they are struggling, and it remains, she says, the reason she cares so deeply about her audience.

The Story Behind The Devil I Knew
Zuraitis traces the title of her new album to two conversations, one with a friend describing a painful pattern as the devil she knew, another with a friend who recognized she had become the villain in someone else’s story. Both ideas pushed her toward an album built around self-reckoning rather than blame, structured in five chapters she names Mirror, Martyr, Malediction, Reckoning and Requiem, and threaded with the words of women poets from more than a century ago exploring stages of grief. Producer Larry Klein helped choose and sequence the songs, including Let Us Hang, a piece he co-wrote with Steely Dan’s Walter Becker that Zuraitis initially resisted as too light before agreeing the record needed its levity. She also describes reclaiming loaded words like devil and witch, pointing to the double standard between how society judges men and women, and mentions merchandise reading Support Women’s Wrongs as a playful extension of that theme.

Advocacy, Partnership, and the Next Step
The conversation turns to Zuraitis’s advocacy for animals, which she says began after she rescued a nine-month-old pit bull mix from euthanasia after moving back to New York City in 2009. She invokes the starfish fable to explain why she keeps rescuing dogs despite the scale of shelter euthanasia in America, saying she can still make a difference to the one animal in front of her. She speaks warmly about her marriage to drummer Dan Pugach, describing a partnership built on humor, mutual respect and shared growth, and reflects on performing for audiences who do not speak English yet still feel every song. Olson closes the hour by praising Zuraitis’s honesty and generosity, then invites listeners to name one delayed dream and take a real, concrete next step toward it, echoing the ladder metaphor Zuraitis used earlier before sending listeners off with blessings and namaste.