Lenox — Nicole was the star. But the co-star at the Linde Center for Music and Learning on the evening of November 15 was unquestionably the crowd of enthusiastic Berkshire music lovers who, after years of clamoring loudly for real year-round Tanglewood programming, finally got their chance to help make it real by buying tickets and turning out in droves to the season’s second jazz program at the Linde Center. And since the show was sold out, any number of disappointed droves could have been turned away.
When you hear Nicole Zuraitis for the first time, it takes only a few seconds to notice that her approach to making music doesn’t hew very closely to jazz traditions. Instead, it honors tradition by brandishing a sharp musical wit that flirts with cliché before eviscerating it.
Two kinds of people comprised the audience on the 15th: those who like jazz music and those who love it. But when she sang covers by Dolly Parton and Jimmy Webb, it made no difference what anyone thought about jazz, because Nicole is a self-taught singer-songwriter with a signature sound that is agnostic of genre. For example, the second song in Friday’s set would remind you a lot more of Joni Mitchell’s harmonic sensibilities than Bill Evans’. Yes, she can sing scat with the best—standards, too—but everything she performs is imbued with a singer-songwriter ethos.
When you hear blues licks at Tanglewood, they are almost always coming off a page of sheet music. Composer Carlos Simon, for example, is so well-rooted in the blues that he can write scores that make BSO musicians sound like they are improvising. But blues aficionados, of course, must have the real thing. And they got it on Friday night, because Nicole is comfortable with everything from blues-inflected pop to straight-up 12-bar blues. For local blues aficionados, it was a moment of triumph to see that one of the most expressive of musical idioms holds a place of respect at Tanglewood.
Nicole Zuraitis works with side players who are naturally inclined to share her feeling for the music she writes and arranges. And her success as a band leader is largely attributable to her talent for recognizing players who share her musical instincts at a deep level.
So let’s talk about Nicole’s guitarist, Idan Morim.
Any guitarist can play memorized scales over chord changes. Only a few can inspire euphoric joy the way Idan Morim does. His remarkable facility on electric guitar is a product of harmonic fluency, an innate melodic sense, and years of experience playing as a freelancer in Israel and New York City. He is a humble man, and you can see the gratitude on his face when he strikes gold and brings forth something sublime.
Bassist Sam Weber fits Nicole’s music like a well-worn shoe. When you have been playing together for as long as they have, you develop a sixth sense that informs all of your improvisations. The same can be said for drummer Dan Pugach, who knows Nicole’s music better than anyone alive.
Expectations were high at Tanglewood’s Linde Center on Friday, November 15, but Ms. Zuraitis and her band easily exceeded them, as the crowd would undoubtedly agree.
