Soul Legend Bettye LaVette Announced At The Soraya

The Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts (The Soraya) welcomes soul and blues legend Bettye Lavette to its stage for the first time on Sunday, October 6 at 7:00pm. With a career spanning over fifty years, LaVette gets inside a song and shapes and twists it to convey all the emotion that can be wrought from the lyric.

Bettye Lavette performs Sunday, October 6 at 7PM. Single tickets starting at $36 are now on sale at thesoraya.org or by calling 818-677-3000.

No mere singer, Bettye Lavette is an interpreter of the highest order as witnessed with her Kennedy Center Honors performance of The Who classic "Love Reign O'er Me." Whether the song originated as country, rock, pop, or blues, when she gets through with it, it is pure R&B. She gets inside a song and shapes and twists it to convey all of the emotion that can be wrought from the lyric. In an interview with Paste Magazine LaVette explains, "I let everyone know that I don't do covers because a cover is a copy. I don't do tributes. I won't sing a song unless I can express something about myself."

LaVette's latest album, Things Have Changed, was released in 2018 and is a collection of Bob Dylan songs, sung in her signature, powerful style. It received two Grammy Award nominations. Rolling Stone said of the record; "Betty LaVette wraps her voice - full of grit, brass and soul when she started recording at 16 in 1962; worn and sharpened by experience - around a lyric about sitting on the lap of strange man with pale skin and an assassin's eye. The way she tells it, that man could be the song's author or a villain in an epic of intrigue, or maybe there's no difference between the two. She makes the song so alive with consequence and possibility, it's able to transform into whatever she or the listener needs it to be in the moment: a spy movie, a romance novel, a Biblical parable of reckoning, a bittersweet memory of a time when caring mattered or a way of drinking away the pain of that memory... The tricks and miracles of Things Have Changed are manifold."

Her career began in 1962, at the age of 16, in Detroit, Michigan. Her first single "My Man - He's a Loving Man," was released on Atlantic Records. She recorded for numerous labels, including Atco, Epic, and Motown, over the course of the 1960s through the 1980s. She also worked alongside Charles "Honi" Coles, and Cab Calloway in the Toni Award winning Broadway musical, Bubbling Brown Sugar in the role of Sweet Georgia Brown.

The 2000's started what she calls her "Fifth Career." Her CD, A Woman Like Me won the W.C. Handy Award in 2004 for "Comeback Blues Album of the Year." She was also given a prestigious Pioneer Award by The Rhythm & Blues Foundation. She recorded four CDs for hipster indie label ANTI- Records over the course of eight years, two of which received GRAMMY nominations.

She has received the Blues Music Award for "Best Contemporary Female Blues Singer," and performed a critically acclaimed version of "Love Reign O'er Me" at The Kennedy Center Honors in a tribute to The Who. She then performed "A Change Is Gonna Come" as a duet with Jon Bon Jovi for President elect Barack Obama on HBO's telecast of the kick-off Inaugural Celebratory concert, We Are One. 2012 marked her 50th year in show business and she also released her no-holds-barred autobiography, A Woman Like Me, co-written with David Ritz. In 2016, album, Worthy, garnered her a third GRAMMY nomination. She also received the Blues Music Award for "Best Soul Blues Female Artist."

Although still not a household name, fans, critics and artists have nothing but high praise for her live show and her interpretive vocal skill. She is one of very few of her contemporaries who were recording during the birth of soul music in the 1960s and is still creating vital recordings today.

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