At age 24,
Veronica Swift is now being recognized around the country as one of the top
young jazz singers on the scene.
In the fall
of 2015, she won second place at the prestigious Thelonious Monk Jazz
Competition. In 2016 she was asked to
perform a concert of her own at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in New York
City and she was a guest artist with Michael Feinstein at Jazz at Lincoln
Center with the Tedd Firth Big Band and Marilyn Maye and Freda Payne. Veronica’s first appearance at Jazz at
Lincoln Center was at age 11 when she performed at the “Women in Jazz” series
at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola.
In the summer
of 2016 she headlined at the Telluride Jazz Festival, her 10th appearance there
– but her first as a headliner. She
first appeared there at age 10 with Dave Adams’ Young Razzcals Jazz Project and
the great saxophonist Richie Cole and later she sang a duet with the featured
artist, Paquito d’Rivera.
Benny Green
possesses the history of jazz at his fingertips. Combine mastery of keyboard
technique with decades of real world experience playing with no one less than
the most celebrated artists of the last half century, and it’s no wonder Green
has been hailed as perhaps the most exciting hard-swinging, hard-bop pianist to
ever emerge from Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.
Since emerging under
the tutelage of Betty Carter, Art Blakey, Freddie Hubbard and Ray Brown in the
early 1980s, Benny Green has become a highly regarded pianist and bandleader.
His efforts to expand upon the language of the classical jazz canon have placed
him not only among the best interpreters but also among the vanguard of
musicians keeping jazz’s evolution going.