Veronica Swift feat. The Benny Green Trio

Showings

MCG Jazz Concert Hall Sat, Oct 20, 2018 6:00 PM
MCG Jazz Concert Hall Sat, Oct 20, 2018 8:30 PM

Description

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.