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sinceileftyoublog · 5 years ago

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Bettye Lavette Interview: The Quiet I Can Be

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Bettye Lavette has had, as she calls it, two careers. The Detroit-raised soul singer-songwriter cut her first record at just sixteen, achieving early success with charting singles and touring with Atlantic Records-signed artists like Otis Redding and members of The Drifters. In the music world, initially, she was never front and center for long periods of time, even giving up recording in the mid-70′s for a six-year run on Broadway to star in Bubbling Brown Sugar. For all intents and purposes, her second career--the one that brought her both critical and commercial success as a solo artist--started in 2005 with the Joe Henry-produced I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, a collection of songs written by female artists like Lucinda Williams, Roseanne Cash, and Fiona Apple. (The title is taken from Apple’s “Sleep To Dream”, which appeared on the record.) Hell started a still-going series of albums of songs written by others, each based around a cohesive theme, like 2010′s Interpretations, covers of British rock artists like The Beatles, Elton John, and The Who. But it’s been her fruitful collaboration with drummer and producer Steve Jordan and legendary jazz label Verve Records that’s produced perhaps her two best albums yet: 2018′s Things Have Changed and the upcoming Blackbirds (August 28th, Verve).

Things Have Changed was a collection of Bob Dylan songs, many lesser-known, that Lavette made her own, to say the least. It helped somewhat that Lavette didn’t have much of a longstanding relationship with the tracks. “[Interpretations tracks] and Bob Dylan songs were not played on black radio a lot,” Lavette told me over the phone from her home in New Jersey in April. “They’re just songs. If you can sing, you should be able to sing them, whether they’re gospel songs, or blues songs, or British songs, they started out words on a piece of paper,” she said. The songs on Blackbirds, however, span different eras and genres, and they’re predominantly written by women of color, many of whom were and are Lavette’s peers. And her relationship to these tracks is more complex. Unlike many soul singers from her era, Lavette didn’t start out singing in the church but in her parents’ home, opting to perform R&B and country and western songs instead. When it was suggested to her in the 60′s by her manager Jim Lewis that she learn standards, Lavette was at first reluctant, wanting instead to learn tunes that were popular at the time, and then admittedly intimidated by the prospect of singing songs by such powerful voices. “While Dinah [Washington] would wait for you in the alley and kill you, her voice was just magnificent. And Ella Fitzgerald’s voice was like an instrument,” Lavette said. Years later, Lavette has found a way to make old songs sound personal.

Lavette credits Jordan with a lot of why Things Have Changed and Blackbirds sound so good. For one, he’s one of the only black producers she’s ever worked with, and she describes her experience singing old songs with him behind the boards and the drum kit as discovering what it would be like had she had someone like him when she first started her career. “One thing Steve knows about me that maybe others don’t...most musicians don’t know the quiet that I can be,” Lavette said. Indeed, their working relationship allows Lavette’s voice to shine. Lavette picks and sings the songs and sends her vocals to Jordan, who will arrange with her and their keyboard player, around her voice. At that point, Lavette, having established such a sense of trust with Jordan, doesn’t hear the arrangements until it’s time to record. The results on Blackbirds are astounding. She’s gentle, yet forceful on Nancy Wilson’s “Save Your Love for Me” and upfront on “Book of Lies”. The songs you might expect to sound stern or sad, like Nina Simone’s music industry olive branch “I Hold No Grudge” and “Blues for the Weepers”, are funky and upbeat, while ones you might expect to be somber, like “Strange Fruit”, are slinky and anthemic.

As much as the songs on Blackbirds, often by their very inclusion, are reflective of Lavette’s incredible career and her place, she prefers to look forward and often gets frustrated by fans and journalists stuck in the past or the mundane. Fans, especially overseas, want her to play old material without understanding the importance of it. “The thing that annoys me about fans--and that’s in air quotes--is just the love without the knowledge, or not wanting to know about it or where it came from,” Lavette said. Or interviewers who ask questions like, “What’s your favorite color?” For the author and now Blues Hall of Fame inductee, it’s a shame, because she wants to talk. When I told her how much I loved Things Have Changed, Lavette said, “Well why didn’t you call me? I have never been more accessible in my life!” Indeed, Lavette was careful to toe the line between re-imagining old songs and being faithful to their spirit. “I certainly did not want to be disrespectful in any way to these tunes,” she said. “I didn’t want to do the disco version, unless it was adaptable.”

“Adapt” is the key word here, and not just in describing how Lavette fit the songs to her voice and how Jordan and company subsequently arranged and played. Lavette, with every word and tone, applies her experience as a black woman, a singer-songwriter and performer for over half a century, to tunes that themselves offer a narrative history of important American music. It’s worth noting that when we finished talking, she signed off, “And by the way...my favorite color is black.”

Read my interview with Lavette below.

Since I Left You: Blackbirds is different from Things Have Changed, since you’re singing songs that were written and performed by a wide variety of different artists and songwriters. Do you change your approach when you’re tackling songs from different people and eras than from the same person?

Bettye Lavette: No, I treat them all as songs. I don’t care where they came from. I think the most unusual thing I’ve ever done in my life was when I did Bubbling Brown Sugar. That was totally out of my wheelhouse. I hadn’t done a play or anything, so I had to approach the whole thing theatrically. But I still approached the songs the same way vocally. My attitude at this stage, the theater, if the song is, “ahhh,” they want, “AHHH!” [laughs] The endings are a little unnatural. But the scenes may have to be ended that way.

But doing these songs in Blackbirds, these were songs I heard as a very young girl, most of them, and did not think I would ever sing them. For one thing, when I was younger I didn’t like them. But then as I learned to respect who these people were, I thought, “I will never be able to sing like that.” That was before I learned, “Just sing it how you sing it! Maybe it is like that.”

SILY: What music did you like when you were younger? What did you grow up listening to?

BL: I liked The Drifters. I’m so glad that I’ve gotten the chance to work with many of the people I grew up listening to. The first time I went on the road was with Clyde McPhatter and Ben King who were both lead singers for The Drifters. And you talk about a groupie! They couldn’t come out of their dressing rooms without seeing me! [laughs] But I always liked to dance. The difference between blues and rhythm and blues was that you couldn’t dance to blues, you could just cry. With rhythm and blues, you could cry and dance at the same time. My voice fell into that kind of music.

SILY: And you elude to that when you perform “Blues For The Weepers” on this album. In the liner notes, you talk about how you could perform that song in a number of different places--a bar, a lounge, a big stadium--and everybody can feel it.

BL: Well, I’m not sure everybody understands it as well as you seem to. People seem to want you to do either what you did before or exactly what they expect you to do. I have a great many fans in England, and they like these songs I did from the beginning till about 1975. They’ve just really collected that period of black music. They hated my album of Interpretations. It’s in my contract that I have to do [the older] songs. I joke that if they didn’t love me before, I would not do this show for anybody else. This is what I’m trying to grow to be, not what I’m trying to relive. To do a whole show? It sounds like a grown person singing silly songs. [laughs]

SILY: At the same time, when you sing a song like “I Hold No Grudge”, at this point you’ve come to accept and even embrace certain things about being a singer and musician and about the music industry.

BL: I want you to be my spokesperson! That’s exactly how I feel. The songs I sing now have so little to do with love affairs. They have more to do with what you just said: Where I’ve come to be at this point in my life and my career.

SILY: In general, on Blackbirds, it’s striking to me how different the arrangements and instrumentation are between original versions and your versions. How do you go about, from an instrumental and arrangement perspective, whether to remain faithful or stray from the original?

BL: I don’t have anything to do with that. Here’s what I do. At this point, I call Steve Jordan, the Bettye whisperer, because he understands what I’m saying. This is the first time I’ve had a black producer since early on in my career of any kind of note. I did one album with one black producer, but he was a black producer who had been producing Norah Jones. It was completely different. But Steve Jordan played with James Brown and loves Motown. What he does is take how I feel about the song and arrange the music accordingly. I usually get just the keyboard player...when I choose the tunes, I sing them the way I want to sing them, and [Jordan will] write it in the way that I’m singing them, as opposed to making an arrangement and I adapt to the arrangement. I sing the song, and he fashions the arrangement around what he’s heard me sing. He comes over to the house, and we sit on the floor of the living room, and he listens to the recordings that I’ve made with my keyboard player. He brings, usually, the keyboard player, who I hope for the rest of my life who will [play with me]. You know, there aren’t a lot of black musicians, and black musicians my age, that I can get to. Most of my contemporaries are millionaires, and I don’t have their telephone numbers. [laughs]

SILY: To what extent are you involved in the mixing and production decisions? Like on “Book Of Lies”, the arrangement has you start out a capella, but throughout that song, your vocals are really upfront in the mix.

BL: I appreciate that. That is absolutely a compliment from any sound engineer and producer, that he makes it all about me. Especially someone as arrogant as Steve. [laughs] He pays very close attention to the words that I’m saying because I pay very close attention to fashioning them to make you hear them. The Billie Holiday song [“Strange Fruit”], most of the younger singers I’ve heard approach this tune, they have great regards for what it’s about, and great regards for Billie Holiday, and being almost 75, I have great regards for me. I wanted all the lyrics to be distinct. I wanted you to understand what it is that happened. It’s not a song; it’s a protest. It’s a jazzier protest. I’m a rhythm & blues singer. And because Steve was born and raised in Harlem, he hears James Brown singing these songs. And that’s what you need to hear if you’re producing. In a recording, it has to be fashioned around me.

I’ve had some brilliant producers and loved so much of what they’ve done that I’ve felt completely comfortable with fashioning myself around them. But this one and [Things Have Changed] are quite different. The last one was the first time Steve and I had ever worked together. He understood exactly what I was saying so quickly. He read back to me an arrangement exactly as how I sang it. I didn’t want to lend myself to the lavish arrangements they had on originally. I told Steve on the Bob Dylan album, “I don’t want to recognize any of these songs.” He pretty much knows that’s the way I work now. I say, “You know we have to leave this lavishness out. I’m not lavish, I’m pretty basic!” I thought he did such a wonderful job when I went to the studio and heard what they were going to play. Because after he and I work on it, I don’t hear it any more until we get to the studio. There’s not a whole bunch of rehearsing. I do the whole album in 4-5 days.

SILY: It’s interesting that you said you don’t want the songs to be recognizable. That’s the approach Bob Dylan takes when he plays his own songs live!

BL: [laughs] He didn’t recognize any of the songs until they got to the chorus. I took that as a total compliment!

SILY: [Dylan] said that to you?

BL: No, he said it to my manager.

SILY: As much as these are songs on a single playing field, it’s interesting and meaningful that something like “Strange Fruit” and “Blackbird” are two songs that so many people know, whereas something like “One More Song”, which is pretty recent, is a standout among more-known standards. Why did you feel it was important to include that one on the record?

BL: The answer is so simple and ridiculous: Because we just liked it! [laughs] Sharon Robinson, she wrote [Patti LaBelle’s] “New Attitude” and a song for me called “The High Road”. She was Leonard Cohen’s writing partner. When Leonard died, they did a tribute to him in Toronto, and I went and did one of his songs. His family actually requested that I come and sing. That was the first time I ever met Sharon. I had heard “One More Song”, and I told her, “I’m going to do this tune.” Same thing with “I Hold No Grudge”, when I met Angelo Badalamenti. I thought, “I’m going to do this song,” 10 years before I met him.

We submitted [the list of] songs to the company, and they thought [about “One More Song”], “Oh, this is new,” but I said, “We’re gonna do it because we like it!” I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard. You could just be playing the music and it would make me cry. I love this song. She is such a fantastic writer. Listen to the lyrics: Have you heard “The High Road”? She wrote the song for [I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise], and I just thought the lyrics were so great. I thought, “Well, she’s black, and she’s a woman. She’s a blackbird, so...” [laughs] She was so flattered when I called her and said I did it. When I sent it to her, she was just so thrilled with it. And Angelo Badamenti, who is now probably 90, when we sent “I Hold No Grudge” to him, he said, “I can see a big grin coming on Nina’s face.”

SILY: Another thing that seemed to be really meaningful is including “Romance In The Dark”, because it’s known for being performed by Dinah Washington [“Drinking Again”] and Nina Simone, who you also cover on this record. It’s almost like the whole record is coming full circle.

BL: I really did. The manager that made this singer you see before you today is named Jim Lewis, and my book [A Woman Like Me] is dedicated to him. When he first met me, he said, “You’re cute, you got a small waist line, but you got nothing to sing. You may not become a star. If you don’t become a star, and you still want to become a singer, you’ve got to learn to sing!” So he brought me all these songs by Dinah Washington. I have worked for 57 years because I learned to tap dance and sing [songs like] “Sweet Georgia Brown”. Those are songs that none of my contemporaries knew because they weren’t fashionable. Jim made me learn these songs that nobody else knew that I didn’t want to learn because I wanted to be a star. I’ve worked everywhere I imagined working. He told me I could do that. But even when I said, “I’m gonna be a star,” he said, “Calm down, honey, you may not be.” He talked to Norman Granz and the Verve label because they helped so many black musicians. Many black musicians played with the Jimmy Lunceford band. [Lewis] was the 6th trombonist. If he weren’t already dead, this would kill him. Verve, and these songs, and a black producer? This would kill him.

SILY: Looking back at it all, it’s got to be pretty unbelievable.

BL: It is unbelievable. I thought I was going to die broke and obscure, but now I’m just gonna die broke. But everybody knows me! [laughs]

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