Veronica Swift: Veronica Swift

Veronica Swift is a masterful jazz singer. Her craft is immaculate. She scats like nobody's business and her texted improvisations are inventive. What's more, she always seems to sing straight from the heart. All that might be enough for some people, not Swift. She is an artistic adventurer who wonders aloud on social media: "What would it sound like if you put together Ella Fitzgerald and—I don't know—Jimi Hendrix?"

An answer is the third track on her self-titled album, a glorious version of Duke Ellington's "Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me." Actually, it's not purely Fitzgerald plus Hendrix; there is a healthy dose of Janis Joplin in the mix. But Swift's astonishing vocal "guitar" solo certainly is more Hendrix (it starts around 3:16). How does one do that? Begin with a buzzy hum and transcribe a lot of Hendrix? Even jazz purists will marvel.

Swift is a self-described "transgenre artist" who pushes hard at the margins. With "I Am What I Am," the album's lead cut, she takes it "nice and easy" at first (to use Tina Turner's phrase), affirming her jazz roots with a playful scat solo, accompanied by drums alone. The voice is pitch perfect and the scat is chockful of referential Fitzgeraldisms. Her reading of Jerry Herman's anthem from La Cage aux Folles is exultant; she is happily apt to transgress (see YouTube, below). Her choice for the second cut, Trent Reznor's "Closer," removes any doubt of that. The 1989 Nine Inch Nails original featured a video that is safely described as shocking. Swift's vocal delivery is forceful, but—conservative jazz fans rest assured—her version appears closer to a whimsical cover by Los Angeles-based singer-actor Kenton Chen. One difference is Swift's first-rate scat solo.

She alters the mood with her fourth offering, a superb medley of Queen's "The Show Must Go On" and Leoncavallo's "Vesti La Giubba," from Pagliacci. "The Show Must Go On" was written by Brian May shortly before Freddie Mercury died of AIDS in 1991. Mercury only performed it live once. In Swift's arrangement (and her lyric translation), it functions as a recitative before the aria; she sings the latter as a jazz-bolero in the style of the Nat King Cole trio's "Laugh! Cool Clown." Swift's arrangement nods to Mercury's "It's a Hard Life" (1984), which opens with a brief melodic interpolation from the aria ("I don't want my freedom, there's no reason for living with a broken heart"). So ends side one of Veronica Swift.

Actually, Veronica Swift's first side was recorded when she was nine, with her parents, bebop pianist Hod O'Brien and singer Stephanie Nakasian. She released her second album at thirteen. Before graduating from music school, she had won second place in the Thelonious Monk Competition, and has since topped polls and performed with jazz greats. Her career has broadened and deepened. She stretches the boundaries even further with this release. The work is fearless, passionate, and finely wrought.

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