By Marilyn Lester***When a sold-out audience can’t stop clapping and whooping for an encore, and won’t let up until that happens, you know the performer in question is special—even iconic. An indeed, R&B/soul Queen Bettye LaVette is just that. In over 
almost six decades in the music business she’s had an intriguing life and a career of starts and stops and starts (read her 2012 memoir, A Woman Like Me). In this century LaVette has been recognized, lauded and propelled into a deserving stardom. At the Iridium, she gave a stellar performance that encapsulated why she’s already legendary.
One of the highest accolades this reviewer can bestow on her is to call LaVette the Mabel Mercer (Google her!) of R&B/soul. Like Mercer, LaVette is a master of lyric interpretation. She doesn’t just sing, she lives in the song, inhabits it—and you, the listener, are pulled right into her story. She began her set with “See Through Me” from her new CD, LaVette! (nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album). She ended with her encore of “It’s Alright” (the last track on the CD). In the journey from first to last, it’s evident that while LaVette was always a deep interpreter of song, life experience is etched all over her deliveries now.
Narrative is minimal in other than cabaret 
concerts, and in her short (and insightful) text, LaVette displayed a marvelous sense of humor, also evident in some of her lighter tunes. She sang from the CD, “Lazy (and I Know It),” with irony and perfect timing, telling, among other factoids, that once she had a day job that did not thrill her and lasted only a few months… longing to be in a nightclub instead. In “Plan B” the joke is that there isn’t one. Like most of the tunes on LaVette!, this pair was written by Randall Bramblett, a writer that she’s on record as calling the best she’s known in the last 30 years.
LaVette also dipped back into past repertoire that naturally reflects the ups and downs of life in the sometime soap opera that is R&B. But first, “In the Meantime,” she offered a ballad of regret with the lyric “I’m dreamin’ dreams of my used-to-be.” It’s a gut-wrenching number and LaVette makes the most of it, her “gruff” (as she calls it), raspy voice hammering home the pain. Yet, there are no regrets as voiced in Nina Simone’s “I Hold No 
Grudge” in which LaVette’s phrasing is particularly impeccable. The irony of Bob Dylan is communicated with style on “Things Have Changed,” with lyrics as relevant today as when the song was written more than 20 years ago. LaVette, who always establishes a terrific connection with her audience, was particularly having fun on this one as she sang “people are crazy, times are strange.” And going back to where things began, she offered a hit from 1965, Dee Dee Ford’s “Let Me Down Easy.”
Providing superb musical backup for LaVette were her drummer Marco Giovino, leading a quartet that included Tom West on keys/synth, providing the Hammond B3 organ licks so essential to soul/funk/R&B; bass guitarist Marc Hickox; and guitarist Bobby Keyes.
