Nicole Zuraitis‘Live at Vic’s’La ReserveThe Birdland Big Band‘Storybook – The Music of Mark Miller’Birdland Records“Got My Mojo Workin’” is a great song to start a set with, as singer-pianist-songwriter Nicole Zuraitis proved both on her new album, “Live at Vic’s,” and also at her album launch party Thursday night at Drom. “Mojo” is not only an appropriately uproarious opener that immediately gets a whole joint rocking, it’s also a song that connects various strains of American music to each other. A signature song for Muddy Waters, “Mojo” is easily one of the most famous songs associated with the entire genre of the great Mississippi Delta bluesmen. The song was written by a lesser known musician, Preston Foster, who was inspired by “Hands Off” by a Kansas City jazz icon, pianist Jay McShann.“Mojo” received its most masterful recording courtesy of the great Louis Jordan, who brought out its self-deprecating comic potential. More than anyone else, it was Jordan who stressed the song’s second line and subtitle, “Got My Mojo Working (But It Just Won’t Work on You).” A few years later, a pioneering jazz organ giant, Jimmy Smith, who was obviously inspired by Jordan’s organist, Wild Bill Davis, established the song as a jazz standard.Nicole Zuraitis incorporates the whole history of “Mojo” in her version. Muddy Waters, most famously in his live recording from the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, is boastful and confident when singing it, so there’s no doubt that his mojo is working. When Jordan sings the song, you come to precisely the opposite conclusion; no, his mojo is not working, at least not on the woman he has in mind. Jimmy Smith kind of splits the difference: He’s upbeat, but not taking anything for granted. “I got my mojo working,” he sings, “and I’m going to try it on you.” Nicole Zuraitis. Victoria RagsdaleMs. Zuraitis is all of the above, and her mojo certainly works wherever she plays and sings it. This was borne out on her new album, which was taped about three months ago at the Las Vegas club Vic’s, and on Thursday night at Drom, wherein everyone in the crowd was quickly captivated by an overwhelming display of mojo-ness. Assisting in the mojo-nicity of it all were her touring rhythm section featuring guitarist Idan Morim, bassist Sam Weber, and drummer Dan Pugach along with guests including keyboardist Rachel Eckroth and veteran saxophonist Tom Scott, whose roles were filled at Drom by David Cook and Troy Roberts.From there, both on the album and live, she moves easily into Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You,” starting slowly, apparently taking Sarah Vaughan’s definitive 1973 voice-and-piano version as a point of departure. But what began softly and quietly soon expanded into a full-on romper, with Ms. Zuraitis rocking the house. Here, she was assisted by solos from Mr. Weber — who likes to launch with a quote from “Swinging on a Star” — and Mr. Morim. There was also something we didn’t expect: a full blown-scat solo from the star singer herself. There are other numbers that start intimate and stay that way, like “Pure Imagination,” which she sings accompanied only by Mr. Morim, who creates postmodern soundscapes on his guitar that recall Bill Frisell. “Live at Vic’s” is the singer’s first album since her Grammy-winning “How Love Begins,” a set of originals, and she extends that tradition with a few excellent new songs, including the very intense “All Stars Lead to You.” In addition, she offers two more cheeky, semi-comic old-school numbers, “Middle C” and “The Coffee Song,” the latter being a deliberately innocuous title that doesn’t give away the central pun of the lyric. Still, her funniest song may be “Nonsense,” which she wrote with arranger-compooser-trombonist Mark Miller, as heard on his group’s latest, “Storybook – The Music of Mark Miller.”Ms. Zuraitis starts with a Muddy Waters blues and essentially ends with a Nina Simone folk song, “Sea Line (aka Sea Lion) Woman,” one of many numbers that entails audience participation. She also demonstrating her propensity for picking the right pop and country songs and infusing them with her own jazz-driven sensibility, like her moving treatments of Benard Ighner’s “Everything Must Change, Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” and especially Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Linesman.” The latter is an especially percussive interpretation, in which the telegraphic dots and dashes baked into the tune are expanded upon into a countermelody and polyrhythm by Mr. Morim and especially Mr. Pugach, who in addition to being an excellent drummer, a Grammy-decorated bandleader, and Ms. Zuraitis’s other half, is also one of the only dudes I’ve ever seen who can seriously rock a manbun.
