Sundas Naqvi is a jazz and folk vocalist, songwriter, and occasional vocal coach based in Chicago. She performs at jazz lounges, coffeehouses, private events, and seasonal festivals across the city, and she volunteers with youth music programs when her schedule allows. In this conversation, she talks about the people, places, and habits that still shape how she sings and writes, long after she stopped thinking of herself as a beginner.
You Have Been Performing and Teaching for Years Now. Who Do You Still Learn From?
Mostly other musicians in Chicago, the ones playing the same rooms I play. You hear a bass player phrase something differently than you expected, or a guitarist leave more space than you would have, and it changes how you sing the next song. I also learn from the kids in the songwriting workshops. They do not know what is supposed to be hard, so they try things I would have talked myself out of. A nine-year-old will rhyme two words that have no business rhyming and it works.
Does Coaching Youth Soccer Feed Into the Music at All?
More than people expect. Coaching is mostly about patience and watching closely, figuring out what a kid actually needs versus what you assume they need. That translates directly to a stage. An audience tells you things if you watch them, the same way a team of eight-year-olds tells you things if you watch them. You adjust. You do not force the plan you walked in with.
What Have You Taken From Going Back to England?
Perspective on pacing, mostly. English folk music, the kind I grew up around, tends to let a line breathe longer than American jazz phrasing usually allows. Every time I visit family, I come back having half-remembered that. It is not a conscious decision to change my style. I just notice I am holding a note a beat longer after a few weeks home.
Is There a Writer or Book That Keeps Coming Back to You?
Classic British literature, honestly, more than any songwriting book I have read. The way those writers withhold information, give you a detail and make you wait for what it means, is close to what a good lyric does. I do not try to write like Austen or Hardy. But the patience in how they build toward something has stayed with me since I was young.
What Do You Take From a Night That Does Not Go Well?
I used to take it personally, assume something was wrong with the song or with me. Now I treat a flat night as information about the room, not a verdict on the music. Was it too loud at the back. Did the set list bunch up all the slow songs together. Usually the answer is small and fixable, not dramatic.
Who in Chicago’s Scene Do You Watch Closely?
The musicians who have been doing this for decades longer than I have, the ones who still show up to small rooms on a Tuesday for no reason except that they want to play. That tells you something about why you are doing this in the first place. It is easy to chase bigger rooms and forget that the work itself, the actual hour of singing, is the point.
Has Teaching Changed What You Listen for When You Sing?
Yes. When you explain breath support to a beginner for the hundredth time, you end up listening to your own breath support more carefully too. Teaching makes you specific about things you used to do without thinking. That specificity carries back into my own sets, even when nobody is grading me on it.
What Is Something You Learned Late That You Wish You Had Learned Earlier?
That the quiet parts of a life, the walks through a neighborhood, a Sunday match, an old novel, are not separate from the music. I used to think the work was only the hours on stage or in rehearsal. Everything else was just life happening around it. Now I think the walks and the matches and the books are where half the songs actually come from. The stage is just where you say it out loud.
What Keeps You Curious After This Many Years of Performing?
Honestly, the fact that a song never lands the same way twice. I can sing something I have performed fifty times and a different line will catch in my throat depending on who is in the room or what kind of week it has been. That keeps it from ever feeling finished. If I had it all figured out, I am not sure I would still want to do it.
About The Author
