On her new album, the genre-blurring provocateur born Niia Bertino revisits her earliest musical ambition: to be a jazz singer in the tradition of the greats, using her impossibly expressive vocal instrument to tell stories of love’s complexities, with both humor and heartrending pathos.
She does just that throughout V, her new album, on the legendary jazz label Candid Records. But she does it her way, without apology, supported by visionary young talents like the writer-musician-producers Spencer Zahn and Lawrence Rothman, the hitmaking songwriter Chloe Angelides and fantastic L.A.-based players working on the axis of jazz and indie.
At its core, V is the jazz-trained singer’s answer to a question that has lingered for her in recent years: “What is jazz for me?”
In place of well-worn standards, she’s crafted an album primarily of bold original music. Instead of familiar acoustic instrumentation, V seamlessly meshes the studio imagination and electronic textures of experimental pop with the thrilling interplay that only live, jazz-rooted musicianship can bring. And in lieu of the winking, veiled storytelling of the Great American Songbook, Niia V is lyrically brazen, hysterical and postmodern; her stories exist in that creative sweet spot between self-love and self-loathing. “The good and bad live side by side,” she says, “often in the same verse. That contradiction is the truth.”
Look no further than the album opener, “fucking happy,” with its spellbinding vocal cadenza, or “Ronny Cammareri,” which takes its title from Nicolas Cage’s Moonstruck character. “I love Moonstruck and I love Nicolas Cage, and I feel like Ronny a little bit — I feel a lot like Ronny who is chaos, passion and fate -love that makes no sense but changes everything she says. “And I just thought it was fucking funny.”
Even the album cover is Niia doing Niia, not Niia doing revivalism. It features the artist affixed with a heretic fork — an instrument of medieval torture reserved for those who spoke out against dogma and orthodoxy. It’s a startling image, and a meaningful one.
“I remember my old jazz vocal teacher smoking a pack of cigarettes during my lesson in her basement and throwing water bottles at me,” Niia laughs. “And I remember thinking, jazz is insane. Growing up, my favorite jazz vocalists from the ’30s through the ’50s were drug addicts or badasses or feminists or all of the above.
“If I’m going to make my statement in this genre,” she continues, “I need to be a disruptor.” What’s fascinating is that Niia had already done the disrupting.
Niia 5 arrives as a welcome addition to an exhilarating contemporary jazz scene that is positively genre-averse. It’s a zone where artists like BADBADNOTGOOD, Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington and Thundercat have used their jazz training as a tool for melding a wide range of progressive musical worlds — without fear of purist reprimand. And in many ways, it’s an aesthetic that Niia helped to firm up early in her career, when her acclaimed debut, I, embodied the kind of moody, musicianly alt-R&B often called “jazz-adjacent.”
On that record she merged all the best lessons of jazz-informed pop and indie — Sade, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Prince, Portishead — into a fearlessly personal showcase for a voice that the New York Times critic Jon Caramanica called “husky in depth but tender in tone.” He also named I one of the best releases of 2017.
That voice — the rich, complex texture of it, and its startling technical command — has everything to do with jazz. Niia grew up in the Boston area, the daughter of a classical piano instructor who implored her children to take up that same pursuit. One day, mom discovered that her daughter was cheating her way through lessons; her ear was so good she was quickly memorizing her pieces rather than learning to read notation. So she switched Niia to jazz piano — “more fun,” Niia says — leading to another revelation. “I had a jazz piano teacher who would have me sing the melodies while I was practicing,” Niia recalls. “And he pulled my mom aside and said, ‘Niia is a pretty good piano player, but she’s a really good singer. I’m gonna put her in my jazz ensemble.’”
It was middle school, and as Niia grew and changed her vocal instrument did too. The cloying female voices of her school’s music-theater department were out, and the Sarah Vaughan CD her mother had given her as inspiration was in. “It was like a psychedelic experience,” she laughs. “I became obsessed with all the female jazz singers and got really serious about competing in the jazz band.” She loved the uniqueness and authenticity she heard when Sassy, Billie and Ella sang torch songs, and over time, she developed a passion for the lovelorn, bittersweet moods of trumpeter-vocalist Chet Baker and pianist Bill Evans. “I was a 14-year-old singing about sorrow,” she recalls, “and for some reason I could channel it, though I didn’t really know the depth.”
Prestigious jazz camps led to New York, where she enrolled in the New School as a vocal-jazz major. But the contemporary pop and R&B scene at the time was too heady and enticing, and she was starting to make inroads in that space, so she dropped out and moved to L.A. After being stood up by a producer for a jingle session, she was discovered by Wyclef Jean, and the rest is history.
V returns the singer to her most formative years, but it also incorporates the breadth of what she’s learned since. Fans of her 2022 ambient release, OFFAIR: Mouthful of Salt, will be especially pleased by V’s blend of uninhibited exploration, pop design and glossy, cosmopolitan surfaces — “the composed and the chaotic,” as Niia describes it, “the beauty and the bruise.”
Cases in point: “Pianos and Great Danes” — “those are my favorite things,” Niia says — is svelte, sexy, raunchy club-jazz built atop drum-and-bass. “Throw My Head Out the Window,” which Niia co-wrote with Chloe Angelides, matches diamond-sharp hooks with driving, simmering rhythm and surges of synth, while making space for the rising-star saxophonist Nicole McCabe to stretch out.
V ends with a poignant take on “Angel Eyes,” a lovesick standard covered famously by Ella, Sinatra and so many other vocal icons. Featuring only Niia’s vocal and Benny Bock on piano, it’s an ideal closing statement, a manifestation of her wish to “dance between these worlds of the traditional and this more experimental current scene,” she says. “Basically, I wanted to be myself and reintroduce these things from my past that I love.
“I feel like jazz is the hill I want to die on. It’s where I feel the most seen and heard. And who knows? Eventually, maybe I will make my Chet Baker standards album.”
-Evan Haga 2025
