Since settling in New York City in 2010 Hungarian-born jazz vocalist Nikolett Pankovits has forged a singular body of music, melding the traditional songs and standards of her youth with a luscious array of Latin American rhythms. A stunning fever dream, her impressive debut album Magia is marked by disorienting dislocations and surprising but inspired intuitive connections. Pure, lithe and warm, her arresting voice is alive to countless shades of loss, longing, ache, and regret. Grounded in the Old World but illuminated by the cultural mélange of the Americas, Pankovits’s music is an act of alchemy by a singer with an emotionally charged sound and story unlike anyone else on the today’s jazz scene.