Singer Veronica Swift Calls Her Latest Project Trans-Genre Music, and It’s a Perfect Label

Veronica Swift‘Veronica Swift’Mack Avenue RecordsDid Jerry Herman and Horace Silver know each other? In very different areas, they were two of the major composers of the 1960s: the first a master of musical theater and the second a visionary of the soul jazz movement. Veronica Swift, with her eponymous latest album, offers proof that in addition to hanging out together, the two were joined in their late-night jam sessions by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach himself. Never mind that Bach supposedly died in 1750: He must have somehow joined forces with Herman and Silver for the noble purpose of writing material for Ms. Swift.The result of their combined efforts is heard in the opening track of Ms. Swift’s album. The song itself is an unusual one for jazz purposes, Herman’s “I Am What I Am” from “La Cage Aux Folles.” She sings it as a straight-ahead jazz anthem, which she embellishes by interjecting key passages from Silver’s “Sister Sadie”; then, a chorus or so later, she takes us on a full-fledged detour into what sounds like a Bach two-part invention. During a recent show at Le Poisson Rouge, Ms. Swift described the album — and her current project in general — as what she calls trans-genre music. The mashup of Herman, Silver, and Bach is only the beginning. When she took the stage, her musicians were all wearing what looked like military band uniforms: equal parts Sergeant Pepper and Michael Jackson in his ’80s South American dictator phase. The singer herself was decked out like a high glam drum majorette, in fishnets and gogo boots. She’s something of a post-nuclear vaudevillian on steroids, being in constant, kinetic motion.The meaning of “trans-genre” becomes clear: the second track on the album is “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, which she reharmonizes and then scats eloquently. The third is Duke Ellington’s “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me,” which is thoroughly funkified, re-arranged like a slice of electrified Chicago blues à la Howling Wolf or Muddy Waters. In this idiom, jazz becomes rock and vice versa.Ms. Swift also favors songs from Queen, perhaps the most flamboyantly theatrical of the major British invasion rock bands. There’s Brian May’s “Keep Yourself Alive” and a stunning revision of “Dreamer’s Ball.” Where the 1978 original sounds more like a blues, Ms. Swift and keyboardist Alex Burke treat it like a stride-enabled ragtime song, something Ethel Waters would have relished. She also draws on Chopin, with the 1917 “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” and Beethoven, whose famous sonata forms the backdrop of her original “In the Moonlight.” At LPR, she namechecked Jefferson Airplane, with “White Rabbit,” a psychedelic homage to Lewis Carroll. During the Julie London/Arthur Hamilton classic “Cry Me a River,” she invited the crowd to sing along.The album also has a sweet duo on a folky, guitar-driven original ballad with a misleadingly grisly title, “Severed Heads,” and it goes international with Jobim’s “Chega de Saudade” and “Je Veux Vivre,” from Gonoud’s “Roméo et Juliette.” Both the album and show climax with a triumphantly trans-generic rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” Whereas “I Am What I Am” makes the case that more jazz folk should take a look at Jerry Herman, here she likewise convincingly argues that more punk bands should play Jule Styne. The most stunning of her constructs may well be “The Show Must Go On,” which only starts with the so-titled song from Queen’s 1991 “Innuendo.” A few verses in, she detours into one of the more amazing works by the great Nat King Cole, his 1949 “Laugh, Cool Clown,” a brilliant bebop-and-bongos reconstruction of the “Vesti La Giubba” from “Pagliacci.” Ms. Swift has now rearranged that rearrangement for her combo, with drummer Brian Viglione on hand percussion and new lyrics by the singer that expand upon Leoncavallo’s original ideas about comedy, tragedy, and sad clowns. It’s glitter rock, grand opera, and modern jazz all at once, and quite possibly the greatest thing that ever happened when a king and Queen got together with a clown.

Singer Veronica Swift Calls Her Latest Project Trans-Genre Music, and It’s a Perfect Label

Singer Veronica Swift Calls Her Latest Project Trans-Genre Music, and It’s a Perfect Label

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