June 11 2009
Bettye LaVette
Soul singer Bettye LaVette has been performing and recording for over four decades. Bettye is just now getting her due, with a Blues Award in 2004 for “Best Comeback Album of the Year.” In 2008, she was named “Contemporary Female Blues Artist of the Year.”
Review: LaVette reigns in Dakota appearance
The R&B singer wowed the crowd with her deeply emotive performance, and nobody seemed to mind that she skipped her famous song.
“A change is gonna come,” Bettye LaVette famously sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in January.
Of course, she was referring to Barack Obama, soon to be inaugurated as president. She also could have been referring to her own career. After 48 years as an obscure R&B singer, the underappreciated LaVette finally stepped into the national spotlight for two stunning televised performances: the Who’s “Love, Reign O’er Me” at the Kennedy Center Honors and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” at the Obama pre-inaugural concert.
However on Thursday night at the sold-out Dakota Jazz Club, LaVette, 63, didn’t want to celebrate her overdue ascent to national attention (she hardly mentioned it), but rather she wanted to honor the fifth anniversary of her playing at the Dakota, one of the few clubs on a summer itinerary filled with outdoor festivals and arts-center appearances.
Playing her first one-night stand at the Dakota, LaVette was in great form, sort of demonstrating the best of her semi-annual Minneapolis appearances. She remains the most deeply emotional and physically emotive R&B singer on the planet. When she sings, she gets in touch with the deep recesses of her psyche and soul.
Imagine Otis Redding’s pleading style of Southern R&B rendered with Tina Turner’s leathery lungs, delivered with more emotion than Janis Joplin could summon.
With LaVette wearing a backless black halter top, the aching tension in her muscles was as evident as the agonizing grimaces on her face. No one experiences and purges pain in song like this tiny dynamo from Detroit.
While offering “Choices,” a cry-in-my-beer soliloquy about bad decisions in life made famous by the great country singer George Jones, LaVette was choking up with pain. After her guitarist played a weeping pedal steel-like coda, LaVette had to take a deep, deep breath. So did the audience.
That was one of three transcendent moments in the 80-minute opening set. The others were “Talking Old Soldiers,” with Bernie Taupin lyrics and an Elton John tune, slowed to a funereal pace, and the closing, a cappella rendition of Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” a note of strength after an evening of pain.
That LaVette didn’t sing “A Change Is Gonna Come” or “Love, Reign O’er Me” didn’t really matter. She didn’t want to signal a change; she wanted to give an indelible valedictory performance at her favorite Dakota.
“Is there any soul singer who brings more guts, more conviction and more emotion to her singing?” – NPR
“Is there a more wrenching soul singer alive than Bettye LaVette? If so, keep it to yourself, because I’m too wrung out from [her newest CD] Crime’s intensity to take anything more emotionally potent” - Entertainment Weekly
“LaVette’s nuanced singing evokes prime Tina Turner with even more command” – Rolling Stone
“Classic soul singing doesn’t get any better” - New York Times
“The sexiest female vocalist alive” - Esquire
“She sings, she smolders, she testifies … An extraordinary combination of raw emotion and sublime musical intelligence enhances a voice hinting at decades of disappointment, cigarettes, tear stained pillows and benders - Dimitri Ehrich, Uptown Social
“Living proof that classic soul is as durable a style as any brand of American music.” – New York Times
“LaVette … she’s a musical force of nature, a hurricane in heels that whips up a fiery mix of soul, jazz, country and blues.” - The Houston Chronicle
Last winter at The Kennedy Center Honors honoring The Who’s Peter Townsend and Roger Daltry, Barbara Streisand, Twyla Tharp, George Jones and Morgan Freeman, her gut-wrenching performance of The Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me” provided the one of the evening’s most spectacular moments.
“My favorite moment was when Bettye LaVette sang a very fine version of ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ at the Gala and Barbra Streisand turned to ask me if I really wrote it.” - Pete Townsend
“We showed up for rehearsal, and one of the performers was rehearsing the song for the Who segment. It was a woman named Bettye LaVette…She is gonna steal the show. She was so phenomenal … It will bring you to tears. The room was pin-drop silent when she did this song, and it was just unbelievable”. - Dave Grohl, The Foo Fighters
• “A Change is Gonna Come” • celebrating President Obama’s inauguration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with Jon Bon Jovi
• Bettye’s stunning rendition of The Who classic, “Love Reign O’er Me” at the Kennedy Center Honors
