The Swingle Singers – Close-Mic Classics

The story of a sound that inspired decades of vocal music. 

In Paris 1962, Ward Swingle assembled a group of session singers and had them sing Bach as if it were jazz. He described the sound “as if the singers were whispering in the audience’s ear.” 

The records that followed won Grammy awards, inspired the genre we now recognise as modern a cappella, and crafted a sound that has carried The Swingle Singers for sixty years. 

Close-Mic Classics continues that story, showing how Ward’s writing and arranging shaped a genre, and is still present in how the current group arranges and composes over six decades later. 

With Ward’s centenary only months away, come and celebrate this legacy with The Swingle Singers as they perform his original arrangements in the oldest grand music hall in the world. 

Hear live some of the celebrated reimaginings of Bach, jazz standards, and original writing that made The Swingle Singers a household name.