Niia

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.”