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Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Dida Pelled

Dida Pelled walks into a room with the kind of cool confidence that makes people pay attention—and then she backs it up with the musicianship to keep them there. A jazz prodigy with a wide-open musical imagination, Pelled is a Brooklyn-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter known for her playful personality, laid-back charm, and fierce dedication to authenticity. Her sound moves easily across jazz, blues, and roots-driven songwriting, and her audience has grown around one simple truth: she’s the real thing—steady, intimate, and impossible to ignore once you’ve heard her.

Whether she’s delivering a jazz standard, a scorched blues, a torch song, or an original, Pelled has a rare gift for connection. She doesn’t just play songs—she tells them. Every lyric lands with precision, every phrase feels lived-in, and by the end of the night, audiences leave with their tastes expanded and their emotional worlds a little bigger.

Pelled moved to New York at age 20. While studying at The New School, she was playing a bar gig in the West Village when trumpeter and producer Fabio Morgera discovered her and offered her the chance to record her debut album. The result was Dida Plays and Sings (Red Records, 2011), featuring jazz greats Roy Hargrove and Gregory Hutchinson. The album was quickly named one of AllAboutJazz.com’s Albums of the Year and drew praise for its warm, emotive vocals and deeply personal guitar work. It also launched Pelled into international touring across Europe and established her as a distinctive voice on the New York scene.

With her second album, Modern Love Songs (2015), Pelled expanded her reach even further, touring widely through France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Czechia, and across the United States. A standout track, “Jack Nice,” helped introduce her to listeners beyond the jazz world, showing her range as a songwriter and performer—and, as she jokes, earning her first-ever cowboy hat.

Her third album, A Missing Shade of Blue (Red Records, 2016), spotlighted her instrumental voice in a bluesy organ-trio setting with Rodney Green on drums and Luke Carlos O’Reilly on organ. It was another reminder that Pelled is not confined by genre. She can swing, burn, whisper, and roar—and she does it all with the same unmistakable personality.

Over the years, Pelled has become a familiar presence at many of New York’s most iconic rooms, including Smalls, City Winery, Ornithology, and Dizzy’s Club, as well as beloved now-shuttered venues like the Living Room, Rockwood Music Hall, and Highline Ballroom. Her touring has taken her far beyond the city, with appearances at major festivals including the Padova, Ottawa, Atlanta, and Red Sea Jazz Festivals.

That restless, adventurous spirit fuels her fourth album, Love of the Tiger (2022), a bold and playful record that reshapes love songs into stranger, wider, more fantastical creatures. The album is intimate and kaleidoscopic at once, rooted in Pelled’s own family story—honoring a loving Thai grandmother, a stern Iraqi grandfather, a magician mother, and a father who legally changed his name to “The Tiger.” It’s personal mythology turned into music: funny, tender, a little wild, and completely her own.

Pelled also has a gift for finding songs that feel like secrets worth sharing. That instinct became “The Lost Women of Song,” a live show she has developed over the years—part musical sleuthing, part radical archive-building—devoted to uncovering folk music’s forgotten sirens. The project shines a light on under-celebrated women artists and songwriters such as Connie Converse, Elizabeth Cotten, Molly Drake, Mistress Mary, Tia Blake, The Space Lady, and Norma Tanega, bringing their work into the present with care and conviction.

In 2022, Pelled fulfilled a childhood dream by launching her own radio show. She now produces and hosts “The Dida Show” on Radio Free Brooklyn, with full episodes also appearing on YouTube. The show has become a space where guitarists, songwriters, and music lovers trade knowledge, discover emerging artists, and hear raw, real conversations with the best in the business. Past guests include Larry Goldings, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rachael Price, Mei Semones, Ben Monder, Cassandra Jenkins, and more.

In 2025, Pelled’s momentum continued to rise with appearances at the Alternative Guitar Summit’s NYC Winter Jazzfest showcase alongside Gilad Hekselman, Pedro Martins, Jerome Harris, and Rudy Royston. That same year, she performed at BRIC JazzFest in Downtown Brooklyn, further cementing her status as an artist revered by fellow guitarists and New York insiders alike.

Now, heading into 2026—her self-declared Year of the Fire Horse—Pelled is stepping fully into her first love with I Wish You Would, an unapologetically blues-drenched album featuring Sullivan Fortner on piano, Tony Scherr on bass, and Kenny Wollesen on drums. With this project, she sharpens everything that has always made her singular: virtuosity with bite, storytelling with edge, and a refusal to sand down the strange parts to make anyone comfortable. This is Dida’s grand blues statement—long-awaited, fully lived, and ready to hit.

Dida Pelled is that rare artist who can command a room with pure skill, disarm it with a laugh, and then leave the audience wanting more. Casual listeners, jazz-curious newcomers, die-hard bebop heads, and deep guitar nerds all find something to love—because she’s not just playing music. She’s creating a world, and she’s inviting you in.

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