Sundas Naqvi: Moving Cities Does Not Mean Leaving Your Sound Behind

Chicago, Illinois, 21st October 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Chicago jazz and folk vocalist Sundas Naqvi shares the lesson she learned when she moved her music from southern England to the American Midwest, and what she now tells other musicians who relocate.

Leaving One Sound for Another

Sundas Naqvi grew up in southern England, singing in school choirs and small community concerts before she found jazz and folk music at university. That sound, built around British choir traditions and acoustic folk, was the only musical language she knew.

In her late twenties, she moved to Chicago. The city had its own musical history, built on blues, jazz clubs, and a folk scene that worked differently than anything she had performed in before. She had to figure out where her voice fit inside it.

“I thought I was bringing a finished sound with me,” Naqvi says. “What I actually brought was a starting point.”

What Changed, and What Did Not

Naqvi did not rebuild her style from scratch. The jazz standards she loved stayed. The folk influences she picked up in England stayed too. What changed was how she used them.

Chicago’s jazz lounges rewarded a different kind of phrasing than the rooms she had performed in back home. Its coffeehouses wanted something quieter and more conversational. Private events and seasonal festivals each asked for their own pacing. She learned to read a room the way she once read sheet music.

“The songs didn’t change,” she says. “I changed how I told them.”

That shift shaped the storytelling that now runs through her sets, songs built around resilience, family, and the small moments that connect strangers in a room. Naqvi says those themes came less from any single influence and more from paying attention to what audiences in her new city responded to.

The Lesson She Tells Other Musicians

Naqvi now volunteers with youth music education programs around Chicago, leading beginner songwriting workshops and vocal sessions. She says the musicians she meets, young and experienced alike, often make the same mistake she almost made: treating a new city, a new audience, or even a new venue as a place to perform an existing sound rather than a place to grow one.

“You don’t have to choose between where you came from and where you are,” she says. “But you do have to let the new place change you a little. If it doesn’t, you’re not really there yet.”

Her advice to musicians who relocate, or who are simply trying a new room for the first time, is to treat the first several performances as listening exercises. Watch how people react to pacing, silence, and song choice before deciding what to keep and what to adjust.

“A song that works in one room can fall flat in another,” Naqvi says. “That’s not a failure. That’s information.”

Still Bringing England Into the Room

Naqvi returns to England when she can, to see family and lifelong friends. She says those visits keep her connected to where her musical instincts started, even as her sound has grown around Chicago’s own traditions.

She still reads British literature alongside contemporary fiction, a habit she picked up long before she ever sang jazz. She spends free time exploring Chicago’s older neighborhoods and photographing its architecture, work she says sharpens the same instinct for detail she uses when she is writing a song.

“Noticing a building’s small details isn’t that different from noticing what makes a lyric land,” she says. “Both come down to paying attention to things most people walk past.”

That habit of attention, more than any single technique, is what she now tries to pass on in her workshops: slow down, notice the room, and let the place you are in actually shape the art you make there.

About Sundas Naqvi

Sundas Naqvi is an independent jazz and folk vocalist, songwriter, and occasional vocal coach based in Chicago, Illinois. She performs at neighborhood jazz lounges, coffeehouses, private events, and seasonal festivals throughout the city, blending jazz standards with contemporary folk influences. She also volunteers with youth music education programs, leading beginner songwriting workshops and vocal sessions for children in Chicago’s local arts community.