(Reprinted from the November 2020 issue of Downbeat magazine)
Singer Veronica Swift returned home from a gig in Italy just in time to celebrate the birthday of her mother, acclaimed jazz singer and educator Stephanie Nakasian. On Aug. 28 Swift, billed as one of “The Three Divas,” had played a sold-out, socially distanced concert in the Boboli Gardens at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence as part of the Gallery Uffizi’s New Generation Festival. Nakasian’s birthday party was two evenings later at the family farm in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“I’m having an emotional crash after one of the most amazing weeks of my life,” Swift told Downbeat by phone the day of the birthday party. The concert was just the kind of spectacle that Swift likes: an eclectic amalgam of opera, jazz, musical theater, big band, tap dancing, and one alarmingly convincing prat fall.
If she was having a tough time coming down from a performance high, though, her phone demeanor belied it. During the interview, she spoke smoothly about her upcoming album, This Bitter Earth, her second Mack Avenue release, and mused about the new challenges and opportunities that young singers are taking on today. From her poise in discussing these issues, it’s clear that global success rests easily on Swift’s shoulders.
To many, Swift’s star rose surprisingly fast. She first stepped into public awareness with her second-place win behind Jazzmeia Horn at the Thelonious Monk Competition in 2015, a year before she graduated from University of Miami’s Frost School of Jazz. Relentless gigging followed—in the world’s best jazz clubs, at prestigious jazz festivals, with celebrity-led ensembles. And finally, she signed the deal with Mack Avenue for her 2019 album Confessions, which dazzled audiences and critics alike. All this by the age of 25.
But Swift disagrees that her career rise was precipitous. “I’ve been touring since I was nine years old,” she said. “So, it’s not like this all happened overnight. People get that impression, but I’ve been putting in the hours, believe me.”
Her claim is hardly an exaggeration. The only child of Nakasian and pianist Hod O’Brien (1936-2016), Swift spent much of her childhood bundled up in the back of the car while her parents toured. (“That’s why I can sleep on planes so well,” she joked.) Before the age of 12 she’d headlined at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, learned the trumpet, and released two albums introducing children to different forms of jazz, including bebop. Not your typical preteen goings-on.
In 2004, on Veronica’s House of Jazz (HodStef Music), the first of her youthful albums, a nine-year-old Swift assumed the moniker by which her later career would thrive. “My father was adopted, so even though O’Brien is my legal last name, his biological mother’s last name was Swift,” she explained. “Since I never knew his side of the family, [using that surname] was my way of honoring that heritage.”
The notion of honoring one’s heritage—musical and otherwise—crops up periodically as Swift discusses her career, almost as a disclaimer for the unconventional turns that her art sometimes takes. In truth, it’s hard to miss the level of informed expertise that she brings to the least of her vocal lines, so firm is her grasp on a multiplicity of vocal traditions. Whether she’s singing in a European song form, with its clarion tones and preferred technique, or an American roots-based form, with its diasporic grooves and improvisational phrasings, Swift manages to strike unerringly at the musical center of whatever task is at hand. It’s only once she’s established her footing that she moves into uncharted territory.
“I like keeping the disciplines as their own thing,” Swift said. “If I do an opera concert, I’ll keep the music as it was originally intended. But then I would program around that song, with an aria, but in a jazz style. I want to understand the subtleties of a style, and I try to present [that style] in the most authentic way I can—while remaining authentic to myself.”
Like many singers of her generation, Swift holds that authentic creative expression doesn’t necessarily fit squarely into any one category—the idea seems almost anathema to the creative impulse itself. “I can’t just do one thing,” she asserted. “I get branded as a songbook singer, when in fact only 25 percent of my repertoire is actually songbook.”
She points to the repertoire for This Bitter Earth by way of illustration. There’s the opening track, a mournful, Max Richter-inspired version of Dinah Washington’s popular R&B song as the title cut. Then a spate of musical theater classics in modern jazz settings (“How Lovely To Be A Woman,” “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” “Getting To Know You”), and the satirical bebop novelties, Dave Frishberg’s “The Sports Page” and Bob Dorough’s “You’re The Dangerous Type.” By the closing track, a jazz-drenched version of The Dresden Dolls’ gripping rock ballad “Sing,” any thoughts of Swift as a songbook stylist have evaporated.
The album also contains one little-known shocker that will give almost any listener pause: Swift’s guitar-voice duet of Carole King/Gerry Goffin’s 1962 single, “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss).” Never popular, the problematic tune about domestic violence, as gentle as a lullaby in Swift’s voice, is all the more horrifying for its sweetness.
With apologies to King and Goffin, whoever thought that writing such a tune was a good idea?
Swift never asks this question in so many words, but her intent hangs in the air. Likewise, the album’s other 12 tracks ring with similarly unspoken questions; in this indirect manner, the protean singer makes clear her views on the harsh societal ills that these tunes address: racism, school shootings, fake news, and women’s struggles in the workplace.
“It’s crazy to me that the concept of this album is even timelier now than it was when I came up with the idea five years ago,” Swift stated. “The album is a commentary on the way things are. It’s really hard to do this in a topical way that isn’t offensive. But the album isn’t preachy. [The commentary] comes through its cynicism and humor.”
In these last statements, Swift alludes to the pressured public landscape that many young singers face today. Like all performers, they are now subject to an unprecedented level of scrutiny in their work. They feel a responsibility for the psychological impact that the words they sing might have on their audiences. And they recognize that the musical world they inhabit is radically different from the one that birthed the careers of earlier genre-defining jazz singers like Nakasian.
“It’s never easy [to be a singer], but there’s a lot more freedom now than there was before,” Swift stated. “It used to be that if you were a white woman you catered to one kind of audience, and if you were a black woman to another kind of audience. That’s really not how it works today, which is beautiful. It means that someone can come up on mere artistry.”
Swift identifies with other young vocalists who are forging new pathways in jazz “on mere artistry”—singers like Cécile McLorin Salvant, Cyrille Aimée, and Jazzmeia Horn—and she acknowledges both their grounding in the jazz tradition and their collective need to depart from it.
“These women share a passion and respect for the traditional styles,” she said. “But when we [sing], it doesn’t sound derivative because we are very much from this era. We put our own influences in it.”
Swift understands that the very thing that makes jazz what it is—the syncretizing of different cultural expressions—can render stylistic definitions meaningless after a time. And the more personally syncretic a young singer’s artistic expression becomes, the harder it may be to squeeze into a pigeonhole. This difficulty, challenging as it is, however, presents its own opportunities.
“I don’t know what vocal jazz is anymore,” she admitted. “The more I progress and follow the path of what I do, the more I lose sight of specific niche groups. I just see one community of people who appreciate art. Maybe that’s because I’m touring so much, I don’t have the chance to stay in any one scene for a while. I could try to speak to a specific group—I just wouldn’t know how.”
“I do see the value in branding,” she went on. “At the beginning of one’s career, you have to do it. You can’t make a career otherwise. But by the time you’ve cultivated a fan base, you’ve created your own genre. Think of Nina Simone, Freddie Mercury, Dianne Reeves—these people are their own genre. They paved the way for their own artistry, defined only by their name. You know exactly what their music is when you say their names. That’s what I’m shooting for.”
Even though jazz is where Swift’s name is most recognized today, she appreciates it when fans don’t think of her as a jazz singer. In fact, the term wouldn’t even apply in many of the musical settings in which she finds herself. Take, as just one example, her non-songbook foray into heavy metal as an undergrad in Miami. Still in her teens, she composed a rock opera replete with religious symbolism, Goth stylings, and disturbing imagery. Taken from Christian history, the musical drama’s title, Vera Icon, is a clever word play on Swift’s first name.
“I write original material all the time, in different types of music,” she emphasizes. “In the beginning, though, I want to wait until people know me a little more before I release the original material. I have many albums as a leader, but when it comes to the albums in the public eye, there’s only Confessions right now. I have so much more coming up, and I’m really excited about people getting to know me more and more as the years go by.”
Swift observed that one strategy for introducing the many aspects of her creative persona to her existing fan base would be to pair her different projects with her jazz releases in a way “that makes sense.” With touring on pause because of the pandemic, she spotted one such opportunity while quarantined in Virginia alongside a group of filmmakers with whom she sometimes collaborates. Making the most of her downtime, she began producing a film script that she’d written some years before—a script with a thematic tie-in to the new album.
“The film is an intense and extreme representation of some of the things I touch on in [The Bitter Earth],” she said. “We have to be able to express our emotions about things like domestic abuse and not suppress them, so it’s about that. It’s a very dramatic film.”
Since the start of the national lockdowns in March, Swift also has performed in several remote concerts, including Worldwide Concert for Our Culture, JALC’s online gala, on April 15 and a live stream with Nakasian for Jazz Forum@Home on September 3. Despite the success of these and other broadcasts, however, Swift reserves judgment on virtual performing.
“I’ve had a few [online] gigs here and there, but I don’t take to live streaming,” she said. “That’s not how I want to present myself. I’ve tried it a couple of times, and a lot of people commented that it was so nice to get an intimate view into my life. That’s good, but I don’t want my performing to be a casual thing. I like a show, a concert, a production.”
Swift remains optimistic about getting back to the stage again in 2021, especially given her concert experience in Italy, where live performance venues are opening up more quickly than in the States. Most encouragingly, about 80 percent of her cancelled European gigs from this year have been re-booked for next. In the meantime, stateside, her metal band plans to release a single before yearend; she’s got the film to produce; and in March she’ll make her Appel Room debut at JALC, sharing the mic with jazz legend Sheila Jordan in honor of Charlie Parker’s centennial. And that same month, The Bitter Earth hits the street.
The gigs will be coming back,” Swift stated assuredly. “Because people need music. Your political system and your economy can fail you, but what’s the one thing that people always turn to?”
From her words, it’s clear that Swift feels strongly about the vital role that artists play in our society. So strongly, in fact, that when she heard that one of her most ardent followers was recuperating from the coronavirus, she phoned the woman to bolster her spirits.
“I’m really connected to my fan base,” Swift said. “So, I do that—I call my fans and talk to them. I think that’s very important. We’re just all humans trying to figure this out.” DB