As announced recently by the Rochester International Jazz Festival, the Ann and Marc Iacona Foundation will be presenting An Evening with jazz vocalist Veronica Swift on Saturday, May 14th at 7:30 p.m. at the Theater at Innovation Square in Rochester located at 131 Chestnut St., downtown (you my remember it as the Xerox Auditorium). Tickets are $40 to $60 plus $4 service fee and are on sale online now.
Veronica Swift has emerged as rising star on the international jazz scene. The daughter of a jazz pianist and a jazz vocalist, Ms. Swift has been singing jazz for much of her life, recording her first album at the ripe old age of nine. Since winning second place at the 2015 Thelonious Monk International Vocal Competition, she moved to New York City and has performed or toured with a number of jazz stars, including Wynton Marsalis, Chris Botti, Benny Green, Michael Feinstein and Emmet Cohen. Swift has released two albums on Mack Avenue, including this year's This Bitter Earth, which she will be performing selections from at this concert along with a wide range of other songs. As Will Friedwald wrote in an March 2021 article about Swift's new CD in the Wall Street Journal, she "has a miraculous voice, musical ability and technique, as well as an innate gift for entertaining a crowd." She is also known for her mastery of vocalese and scat, and as Friedwald noted "might be the best scat singer since Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day, Sarah Vaughan and Mel Tormé." According to the announcement of the concert, Swift remarked recently, “These shows at the Theater at Innovation Square are not only a comeback after a year long hiatus of no gigs, but it is a rebirth…. The songs I’ve picked for this show encompass some of This Bitter Earth’s message, but also we have included new songs that mix classical with rock and roll and funk as well as jazz. I now know, my purpose as an artist is to break down these genre barriers and fully immerse the audience in what to me is just simply: music.”
Marc Iacona is the producer and executive director of the CGI Rochester International Jazz Festival, at which Swift performed in 2017 and 2019. His family foundation is donating hundreds of tickets to this concert to the doctors and nurses and other health care heroes at Rochester Regional Health. "Ann and I have supported Rochester Regional Health in many ways over the years," said Marc Iacona. "At this concert, we wanted to do something special to say thanks to the dedicated health care workers there who have worked so tirelessly to help patients who have depended on them over the past two years during this difficult pandemic."
