By WKTV Staff
ken@wktv.org
The St. Cecilia Music Center will feature the Benny Green Trio with “rising star” jazz singer Veronica Swift on March 7 as the final Jazz Series concert of the center’s 135th Anniversary season.
Benny Green, a veteran of the jazz world combines a mastery of keyboard technique with decades of playing with the most celebrated artists of the last half century including Betty Carter, Art Blakey, Freddie Hubbard, Ray Brown, Diana Krall and Christian McBride. Swift is being recognized as one of the top new young jazz singers on the scene.
The 24-year-old Swift will be releasing her next album on Mac Avenue Records in early 2019, which will feature the great pianist Benny Green and his trio as well the Emmet Cohen Trio.
“It will be exciting to see Veronica Swift in this point in her career performing from the new album with esteemed Jazz pianist Benny Green and his trio,” Cathy Holbrook, St. Cecilia executive director, said in supplied material. “Those who love great jazz will be blown away by this concert. It’s really a double bill because either of these artists would be big enough to feature in their own concert, so it’s a two-for-one night!”
Green began classical piano studies at the age of seven, according to supplied material. Influenced by his father, a tenor saxophonist, his attention soon turned to Jazz: “I began trying to improvise on the piano, imitating the records I’d been hearing from my father’s collection, which included a lot of Monk and Bird … it was a gradual process of teaching myself.”
Swift grew up on tour with her parents, renowned jazz pianist Hod O’Brien and celebrated jazz singer and educator/author Stephanie Nakasian, according to supplied material. It was with them where she first appeared at The Jazz Standard, and Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. She recorded two CDs as a child – one at age 9 with Richie Cole and her father’s rhythm section and her mother, and one at age 13 with saxophonist Harry Allen. Her 2015 Album “Lonely Woman” features some of the hottest young jazz players on the scene including Emmet Cohen, Benny Bennack III, Daryl Johns (with whom she shared a Grammy Choir/Band experience), Matt Wigler, and Scott Lowrie. In addition to performing the Great American Songbook and Bebop and vocalese classics, she is also a passionate devotee of 1920s and ’30s music and has sung with Vince Giordano, Terry Waldo, and Drew Nugent.
Concert tickets for Veronica Swift with the Benny Green Trio are $40 and $45 and can be purchased by calling St. Cecilia Music Center at 616-459-2224 or visiting the box office at 24 Ransom Ave. NE. Tickets can also be purchased online at scmc-online.org.
A pre-concert reception for $15 at 6:30 pm, with wine and hors d’oeuvres, is available by reservation in advance. A post-concert party with dessert, coffee and wine is open to all ticket-holders to meet the artists, obtain autographs and CD purchases.
