Bettye Lavette©Andrea Canter

"She lays us flat with her powers of slow-burning devastation." - ELLE

Bettye LaVette, aka “The Great Lady of Soul,” considers the Dakota Jazz Club as a home away from home. One of the first national acts at the club’s newly relocated digs in downtown Minneapolis, the Dakota was also among the first national venues to hire LaVette for her comeback tour in early 2004. And Bettye is quick to mention her gratitude to Lowell Pickett for “taking a chance on an old broad,” to use her vernacular.

Bettye comes back annually and now packs the house with a cross-genre audience of jazz, soul and R&B fans. Her new recording, Scene of the Crime, might also invite more younger and rock-leaning listeners, given the unlikely collaboration between LaVette and the Drive By Truckers. At her shows last week at the Dakota, Bettye noted that the impetus to record her new album in Muscle Shoals, AL was indeed to return to the “scene of the crime”—in this case, the crime being Atlantic Records' failure to market her first full-length recording in 1972, Child of the Seventies, the scene a studio in Muscle Shoals. (It was another ten years before her official debut was released; Child finally was released in 2002 by a French label, retitled Souvenirs.) Scene now follows the unexpected success of A Woman Like Me, for which LaVette won the W.C. Handy Award for 2004 “Comeback Blues Album of the Year,” and the acclaimed I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, released in 2005.

Thus one could also interpret her return to the Dakota as a return to the “scene of the crime” if the original crime was her hell-raising Dakota debut in January 2004 or the subsequent, equally compelling gigs of 2005 and 2006. In essence, Bettye is our annual soul felon, one that this reviewer anticipates eagerly despite the fact that I am otherwise rather immune to attraction of soul and R&B. My ears perk up for Bettye. My eyes as well—you could turn off the volume and still be mesmerized by the visually expressive LaVette. Maybe I also get considerable satisfaction seeing “an old broad” carry on like the teen sensation she was in her early career.

Bettye Levatte with Chuck Bartels©Andrea Canter

Bettye hooks her audience from her first note, a voice that somehow melds Tina Turner grit with Billie Holiday heartache, captivating whether she is belting it out with the band in a defiant, take-no-prisoners attitude or whether she has dropped to the floor (as it seems she always does at least once) in tired resignation, begging “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces” (from Scenes). But the voice itself is only half the performance, each set of lyrics elevated to Pulitzer status through LaVette’s deeply personal interpretation. When she sang, “The thing I thought was Heaven was just fallen debris” (“Somebody Pick Up My Pieces”), you felt her pain, her betrayl, as her emotional delivery sent vibrations from the stage through the floor boards and under our feet. An actress and storyteller as much as a musician, Bettye never rushes a lyric—she dwells in it, lives it, turns the words into emotional magic, as on the powerful “He Made A Woman Out of Me,” “Close as I’m Going to Get to Heaven,” “Stealer,” “Serves Him Right,” and Ray Charles’ “They Call It Love,” and when she slowed down for a moment, on the moving ballad “High Road.” From Scenes of the Crime, Bettye poured out soul atop soul on “Jealousy,” “Last Time,” and “I Guess We Shouldn’t Talk About That Now.”

The band as always was in fine form, surrounding LaVette with a comfortable layer of country-dripped blues and rock-infested R&B, heavy-handed at times, lighter and more delicate when the song demanded it, always in sync with Bettye. But perhaps the most moving performance of the two sets I attended was the encore without the band, an a cappela reading of one of her anthems, “I Don’t Want What I Haven’t Got.”

We didn’t want what she had not got.

Visit Bettye LaVette’s website for more insights into the artist, discography, and more at www.bettyelavette.com