Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.     

At just 25 years old, Veronica Swift has built a resume that even many late-career jazz singers would envy: tours as featured vocalist with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Chris Botti; a guest collaboration with Michael Feinstein; engagements at A-list clubs like Birdland, Jazz Standard, Dizzy’s Club and Jazz Showcase; and gigs at top festivals including Monterey, Montreal and Telluride. In 2015 she earned second place in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocal Competition, the most prestigious contest in the art form. Now comes “Confessions,” her proper breakout debut, accompanied by Benny Green and Emmet Cohen, two of the finest jazz pianists of their respective generations.

     Saxophonist Richie Cole’s professional career began in 1969 when he joined the Buddy Rich Big Band. After stints with the big bands of Lionel Hampton and Doc Severinsen, Cole formed his own quintet and toured worldwide, doing a great deal to popularize bebop and his own “Alto Madness” style in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. He’s performed and recorded with vocalese master Eddie Jefferson, the Manhattan Transfer, Freddie Hubbard, Sonny Stitt and Art Pepper, to name just a few. He’s also worked with the great jazz organ players of the past, and has wanted to collaborate with Tony Monaco ever since the Columbus, Ohio, keyboardist hit the scene in 2000. That wish is now reality with the new CD, “The Keys of Cool.”

 Also this week, pianist and composer Luke Gillespie, professor of jazz piano at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, one of the world’s most prestigious conservatories, is joined by some of his Indiana colleagues including guitarist Dave Stryker and saxophonist Walter Smith III for “Moving Mists”;

keyboardist Mike LeDonne fronts a piano trio session with Christian McBride and Lewis Nash, “Partners in Time”;

and saxophonist Will Boyd is joined by keyboardist Bobby Lyle and reedman Gregory Tardy on his fourth release as a leader, “Freedom, Soul, Jazz.”