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“An Evening With Bettye LaVette”
Café Carlyle – May 24 – June 3
This is a performer who is so riveting and unique, so indefatigable, that after two hours of nonstop singing, Bettye LaVette puts down her mike and sings her encore a cappella, Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” defining one more time the rawness of soul music. She has a voice that growls, cracks, moans and wails, with gripping vocal catches in between. Every syllable is pristine, and in all the songs in her show at the Café Carlyle, “An Evening With Bettye LaVette,” she is totally real, completely convincing.
At age 65, LaVette offers a generous, vigorous collection of songs. This engagement at the posh uptown club comes just as she is enjoying the acclaim she has worked for since she was 16 years old in Detroit. Back then, she already had a Top 10 recording and during the 1960s, she toured with such R&B legends as Otis Redding and The James Brown Revue. There followed a lifetime intermingling recording successes with blocks of dry spells.
In the 1970s, she joined the touring company of the Broadway show Bubbling Brown Sugar. She has worked in small clubs and recorded for 50 years. Major recognition, however, did not come until the millennium. It was in 2008, when she delivered Pete Townshend’s emotionally charged “Love Reign O’er Me” at The Kennedy Center Honors, that she was televised—and remembered by millions. She went on to sing at The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial with Jon Bon Jovi, and her recognition zoomed.
While LaVette always had the voice and the passion, she has developed them into a potent art, a fierce ability to transmit her life through songs that she makes all her own. She sings from the inside out, with intimacy and urgency, phrasing and stressing with understanding, not reconstructing but singing as she would speak, with a gritty, passionate edge, and she puts soul into all genres.
Opening with pride and defiance, LaVette delivers Eddie Hinton’s Southern soul classic “I Still Want to Be Your Baby (Take Me Like I Am).” Don Hill and Fred Burch’s “He Made a Woman Out of Me,” a country song associated with Bobbie Gentry, becomes, in LaVette’s rendition, a street-wise urban drama. In John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird,” written in response to the racial upheavals in the United States, LaVette changes the pronouns in the last lines from the second- to the first person, singing, “All my life, I have waited for this moment to arrive.” The song becomes searingly personal. The pain is palpable in Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Talking Old Soldiers,” a song open to interpretation, ending with the long wail “I’ve got my memories.” The jazz standard “‘Round Midnight” (Thelonious Monk, Cootie Williams, Bernie Hanighen) is just wrenching.
She gives full-turbo ferocity to “Damn Your Eyes” (Barbara Wyrick and Steve Bogard), hooking you and reeling you into its frustration. She will often repeat final lines or words. Ending “They Call It Love” (W.T. Davidson), she strides across the stage, shaking her head and repeating “…but I don’t know.”
A more optimistic mood comes with Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” as she searches for something better after all the no-good men and bad times. Recognizing the passion of present golden moments in Renée Geyer’s “Heaven (The Closest I’ll Get),” she sings the last lines, “This is just about as close/Close as I’m gonna get to heaven/Close as I’m gonna get to heaven,” repeating the word “close” in two syllables (“Clo-ose, Clo-ose, Clo-ose”) as she leaves the room. No, she is not finished. There is one more song, Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream”—and then her encore.
LaVette’s tear-your-heart-out style is accompanied by an excellent quartet, with Darrell Pierce on guitar, Charles Bartels on bass, Brett Lucas on drums and her music director, Alan Hill, on keyboards. Together they set old songs on the front burner with conviction and musicality. Join Bettye LaVette on her wild, emotional ride if you’ve got the staying power.
