There’s an old adage, “you either build from your twenties, or recover from your twenties”
The saying is fitting for Veronica Swift, who celebrated her 30th birthday on her second of four Wednesday residencies at the acoustically adroit Sun Rose. While she joked about the milestone, the fact remains that Ms. Swift’s 90 minute concert proves the wise adage, as her multiple talents, carefully inculcated by being brought up in a nurturing and musical family, showed that she is carving a path that is going nowhere… but up.
Appropriately dressed as a tightrope artist, Ms. Swift is balancing the line of a career that began with bebop but is gradually bringing in sounds of her own generation, with hints of opera, classical, punk and large swaths of her major inspiration, Queen.
In fact, while Swift may look and jump around like Suzi Quatro, she sounds quite a bit like a XX chromosome Freddie Mercury, with maybe a dash of Joplin, but with a control and range that leaves both biting the dust. The band of Carey Frank/key, Gary Joseph Potter/g, Brian Viglione/dr and Anthony Cappeto/b also were in proper sartorial splendor, looking like lion tamers as they made each musical mood sound as if she owned and created them.
With the energy of a USC cheerleader, Swift rocked, swung and bopped out vocals on the energetic “Closer” and even threw in a few vocal horn impersonations to boot. She mixed Hendrix and Joplin with Potter on a rollicking R&B take of Duke Ellington’s “Do Nothin’ Til You Hear From Me” while melding Pagliacci and Queen on a slinky “The Show Must Go On” that segued into a dramatic and haunting read of “White Rabbit”.
The sound of Mercury’s Queen was felt on m any of these songs, with thriving drum work by the flexible Viglione and punk to Pass guitar pickings of Potter. Swift even swung out Queen’s “Dreamers Ball” with Frank’s easy stride and her own tap into her inner Bessie Smith.
But what is most foretelling about Ms. Swift’s future is her own songwriting. While at the early stages of it, she shows originality with a foot in the tradition, as on the Tin Pan Alley meeting Night at the Opera of “Room With A View”, a clever upbeat “Living In A Coma” and the melding of Beethoven and Brian May on “In The Moonlight”
Throughout the entire evening, Swift sang songs of encouragement, peppered with connections with the audience about her own journey, encouraging each attendee to have the courage to find their own path. “I get to be myself” she exuded before stomping out “Get Tough” and a swampy “Get on the Groove Line”, while closing out the evening with songs that reflected her own progress as a pilgrim, “Keep Yourself Alive” and “ Don’t Rain On My Parade”. The path Ms. Swift is on may not be quite known yet, but she showed Wednesday night that she’s got the right compass for the direction.
Veronica Swift continues her residency at The Sun Rose May 22 and 29. After that there is Sunset Jazz 05/31 and Bria Skonberg 07/26