Six months after she triumphantly joined forces with Jon Bon Jovi on Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” at the Obama inaugural,
The 63-year-old vocalist, whose career was rescued from obscurity by 2005’s I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise (Anti-), breaks songs down to their narrative essence. Her voice is weathered, full of cracks and breaks, kind of like Tina Turner in bad need of a lozenge. It’s a lived-hard voice that, while not adept at soaring melody, is capable of communicating a song’s deeper meaning.
LaVette has the uncanny knack of making you consider anew lyrics that you’ve heard hundreds of times (and perhaps forgotten) . When she sings, on the title track, “I used to go the movies/ And I’d try to go downtown/ Somebody was always there tellin’ me/ ‘Little girl, you cain’t come around,’” stretching the words as a pleading lament, it personalizes the song in a way that I’d not heard before.”
Backed by a piano/bass/drums rhythm section and subtle strings, LaVette rounds out the program with some challenging material, mostly because the songs have been so often rendered and their definitive versions established. She interprets “’Round Midnight,” “God Bless the Child” and “Lush Life” as blues-drenched jazz ballads, her voice pulling ears closer with pregnant pauses and conversational asides.
Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” backed only by percussion, sounds like she’s walking down a city street telling a girlfriend about her romantic woes. The set closes a lighter note, with a strutting version of Jimmy Reed’s “Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby.”
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2009.