Veronica Swift
Birdland, NYC, July 3, 2018
Reviewed by Ron Forman for Cabaret Scenes
I have been watching the trajectory of the precocious 23-year-old jazz vocalist Veronica Swift since she arrived in New York two years ago. She has rapidly ascended to the top tier of jazz vocalists. The dynamic and beautiful Swift has all of the tools of a great jazz artist—great sound and range, the ability to do super-fast scat singing, and she moves both gracefully and sexily on stage. She performed every number in her unique style which made even familiar songs seem new. In her week-long stay at Birdland, she is backed by the excellent Emmet Cohen Trio—Cohen (piano), Evan Sherman (drums), Peter Washington (double bass) —and has the confidence to give each of these musicians multiple solos. She has a pleasant demeanor.
The trio opened the show with a swinging “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Swift’s first number was a sped-up version of “I Get a Kick Out of You,” which allowed her to display her ability to scat at a super-fast pace. With the heat soaring to above 90 degrees outside, Swift performed “Something Cool,” beginning softly and with her voice rising appropriately on the word “tall” in the lyric. When I first observed Swift, she was performing songs from the 1920s and ’30s.
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She returned to that era for a very ’20s-like—à la Ethel Waters—”Guess Who’s in Town.
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” She also showed her ability to do a ballad with a moving “A Stranger in Town” that segued into “I Don’t Want to Cry Any More.
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” She can belt with the best, as she showed with George & Ira Gershwin’s “Home Blues” (An American in Paris theme). She closed with a very jazzy, very fast “Pennies from Heaven” that had the audience joining in by singing the title phrase.
