Still relatively early in her professional career, Veronica Swift has already developed an impressive repertoire. Raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, she recorded her first album, Veronica’s House of Jazz, when she was only nine years old. After releasing her sophomore album, It’s Great to Be Alive, when she was only 11 years old, Swift continued performing at major venues such as Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.
Veronica earned her bachelor’s degree in jazz voice in 2016 from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. While there, she composed a goth-rock opera entitled Vera Icon about a homicidal nun. Veronica says she “needed an outlet for the anger” she felt at her father’s (Hod O’Brien) cancer and needed a more dramatic genre to express the emotion. Her 2015 album, Lonely Woman, includes two songs with her father at the piano and may represent the last recording by Hod O’Brien, who died in 2016.
Before college graduation, Veronica competed in the 2015 Thelonious Monk International Vocal Competition, in which she placed second. Two years later, she moved to New York City to further her career and has since performed and/or toured with a host of jazz luminaries, including trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Chris Botti, and pianists Benny Green, Michael Feinstein, and Emmet Cohen.
Veronica has performed on several sailings of The Jazz Cruise over the years and we are excited to have her join us on Blue Note at Sea ’23.