From Wall Street to jazz beats

By Liz Barry

Published: August 20, 2008

Stephanie Nakasian was on the fast track to Wall Street. At 16, she scored her first banking job in Manhattan. Later, she earned an MBA in finance from Northwestern University.
Just as her career was taking off, Nakasian did a complete 180. She traded Wall Street for jazz music, and never looked back.

Twenty-eight years later, Nakasian has received international acclaim for her jazz vocals, including recognition by The New Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz as “one of the important jazz singers in the world today.”

Today Nakasian lives near Charlottesville with her husband, jazz pianist Hod O’Brien, and their 14-year-old daughter, Taylor Swift. Nakasian and O’Brien play shows around the world and at festivals closer to home.

On Saturday, she and the Hod O’Brien Trio will come to the Lynchburg area to headline at the Sedalia Center’s First Annual Jazz & Wine Festival. Her 14-year-old daughter will make a guest appearance.
I caught up with Nakasian earlier this week for a phone interview. An edited transcript of our conversation follows:

Q: How did you go from a financial consultant in New York City to a full-time jazz singer with international acclaim?
A: (Laughter.) You want the short version of this, right? I have to preface this by saying I always was involved in music, since age 4. Not professionally, but I’ve played the piano, violin. I was in choirs . . . But I never thought it was going to be my life.
After a few years in business . . . there was something missing in my life. I missed a deeper interaction with people . . . Then I met Hod O’Brien, now my husband. He was playing at Gregory’s, which was this great place at 63rd Street and First Avenue in New York. It was a very well known club, and he was in the New Yorker every week.
His music was very happening and spontaneous and exciting and relaxing at the same time . . .  . I had never heard jazz improvised and created right in front of me, so I thought that was just amazing.
So we got together, and we just started doing music like five hours a day . . . There was about a 10-month period where I was on Wall Street in the futures business and at the Exchange every morning, and then at night I’d hang out until three in the morning, singing and hanging out and listening to music.  After about nine or 10 months of that, I realized there was no way to do both of those things . . .
So I threw myself a big party — it was like a coming out party — and said, “I’m going to be a jazz singer,” and everyone was like, “What?” (Laughter) I said “I’m going to try this for five years. If it doesn’t work at the end of five years,  … I’ll go back in the business world.”
That was 28 years ago, and I never turned around. 

Q: So now you’re living in the countryside west of Charlottesville, a town called Greenwood. How do you end up there?
A: My parents moved down here in the mid-70s from Westchester County, New York. Hod and I had moved from Manhattan to the Poconos in ’86 . . . 
But when we decided we might want to start a family,  … it looked like it was going to be possible to have steady work down here and raise a family, and be near my family. We decided to just try it. And then I got the job teaching at UVa, then William and Mary and UVa. So everything just fell into place, and we just stayed here. My daughter’s 14 now. She goes on the road with us and records. It’s a workable life here for us.

Q: How did you get into jazz music, and what were some of your early influences?
A: When I met Hod, I heard this music and I loved it. I just really hadn’t listened to a lot of it, so people would tell me, you have to listen to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday.
Then I learned that you really have to listen to the instrumentalists because all the great jazz singers have come from working in bands and being around instrumentalists. The way that we sing is very horn-influenced. When I heard Charlie Parker and Chet Baker and Stan Getz and guy likes that, I heard them singing. They were singing with their horns. When I worked with Jon Hendricks for two years — he’s a legendary jazz singer — he really taught me to hear like a horn. . . When a jazz singer scat sings and improvises, it’s a very liberating experience. I’m not constricted by having to sing a song a certain way; I’m not even constricted by lyric . . .
My husband Hod … taught me a lot. His style of bebop is really probably my biggest influence.

Q: If you could play with any jazz musician alive or dead, who would it be?
A: (Laughter.) Alive or dead, that’s easy. If it was the past, I would have loved to have been anywhere around Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald. . . or Charlie Parker or Lester Young or any of the legendary people. They were just very inspired . . .

Q: So it’s hard to chose just one?
A: Oh yea, it’s hard. I guess I’m most influenced by Ella Fitzgerald. . . She’s very positive. . . I shouldn’t say she was a happy person, she certainly didn’t have all happiness in her life, but she was very happy on stage. She was joyful and celebrating in her expression. She didn’t do drugs or alcohol or anything like that. Whatever sadness she had in her life, it didn’t consume her, you know, like Billie Holiday.  …
Everyone that knew Ella just loved her. They said she was kind and generous. I want to be like that kind of person, plus she did brilliant music. When she sang a song, she really understood the drama of the song and the lyric, as well as the improvisational aspect of it. It’s awesome to be in the same business she was.

Q: What are the top three songs on your iPOD right now? 
A: Shirley Horn. She did a song called “Here’s to Life” that is so beautiful and exquisite. I listen to Louis Armstrong’s early groups . . . I learn Chet Baker solos. He’s a trumpet player but also a singer. He has a solo on “It Can Happen to You” that is great.