The Swingles

Biography —

The Swingles are one of the world’s most admired and loved vocal groups. With a natural flair as entertainers, their stylish, classy shows take them to venues and festival stages across the world. They have earned 5 Grammy® Awards and are recipients of multiple prestigious international accolades. With generations of fans from their live performances and appearances on film and TV soundtracks, The Swingles’ musical evolution and creative drive makes them as relevant today as when Ward Swingle started the group nearly six decades ago.

With their trademark vocal dexterity and innate musicality, The Swingles are reimagining jazz, classical, folk and pop from their ever-growing repertoire of arrangements alongside a rich vein of new original material. The group’s secret ingredient is the ability of the seven singers, soloists, songwriters and storytellers to combine as one seamlessly blended and timeless sound. The Swingles have always made creative use of close-mic amplification, and in the last decade, they have added unique live audio looping techniques to their stage performances – an immersive layering up of vocals to mesmerise the audience.

American-born Ward Swingle first assembled a group of Parisian session singers (originally named Les Swingle Singers) to sing Bach’s music for the keyboard in 1962. The resulting album ‘Jazz Sebastian Bach’ was a huge hit, breaking new musical ground and launching The Swingles to fame. Since then, the group has released more than 50 albums encompassing a huge variety of music, fuelled by Ward Swingle’s pioneering spirit and wide-ranging musical tastes. Carrying forward this legacy, today’s Swingles are Mallika Bhagwat (India/UK), Joanna Goldsmith-Eteson (UK), Katelyn Dietz (US), Oliver Griffiths (UK), Jamie Wright (UK), Owen Butcher (UK) and Tom Hartley (UK).

The Swingles have appeared on film and TV soundtracks, including ‘The Two Popes’, ‘Sex and the City’, ‘Wedding Crashers’ and ‘Glee’, as well as singing the theme for Italy’s beloved TV series ‘Superquark’. In 2017, they co-wrote and performed a song for the end credits of Alexander Payne’s film ‘Downsizing’, and in 2021 sang on Disney’s block-buster, ‘Cruella’. Their prolific output of music videos has earned them millions of views and new audiences around the world.

In 2010, The Swingles founded the hugely successful London A Cappella Festival. Some ten years on, in the face of Covid, they re-created their live workshops and in-person education modules, launching an online education programme for remote and blended learning. Their genre-inclusive approach to music-making has led to great artistic collaborations with artists as diverse as the Modern Jazz Quartet, New York Voices, Jamie Cullum, The King’s Singers, Peter Hollens and Labrinth. Revered experimental composer, Luciano Berio, was one of the first composers to explore the sound of The Swingles’ amplified voices in an orchestral setting with his ground-breaking ‘Sinfonia’, first performed in 1968. Notable performances include those with San Francisco Symphony (with Michael Tilson Thomas), ORF Vienna Radio (with Marin Alsop), London Philharmonic Orchestra (with Vladimir Jurowski), and the Orchestra of La Scala, Milan (with John Axelrod).

Alongside the goal to sing great music at the highest level for the enjoyment of others, The Swingles have a keen sense of social responsibility which they practice. They are also committed to devoting a large part of each year to work in education around the world, bringing their technical skills in the vocal arts together with stagecraft, improvisation, genre versatility, songwriting and arranging.