The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Groove to some soul and blues
The Kate is set to host Kat Wright Trio and Hall of Famer Bettye LaVette
OLD SAYBROOK — The Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center is bringing in two acts over the next two weeks: A trio led by American singer/songwriter Kat Wright, and blues great Bettye LaVette.
The Kate will welcome LaVette April 12 at 8 p.m.
For her latest Grammynominated LP, titled “LaVette!,” the vocalist teamed up again with producer Steve Jordan for a special release on JayVee Records.
“An interpreter without peer, Bettye chose to record an album of songs written by Randall Bramblett,” the news release said, quoting LaVette: “I think he’s the best songwriter I’ve heard in the past 30 years, and I just discovered him eight years ago.”
“Bettye LaVette is like a combination of Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis,” Jordan said in the press release. “When I prepare a band for her, I make sure we have it together. When she joins us, we’re only gonna get one or two takes, because she puts her heart and soul into each performance.”
The late country musician George Jones called LaVette “a singer’s singer,” the news release said.
Born in Muskegon, Mich., her parents, Louisiana migrants, ran a club out of their home. “They sold corn liquor and chicken sandwiches and spun records for the Black auto parts workers and traveling gospel groups who didn’t have a hangout to kick back in and call their own,” The Kate said.
“When Bettye gets a hold of a song, it becomes her song,” Jordan said in the statement. “It’s like she wrote it. She’s a great messenger, a communicator, an interpreter.”
LaVette is a seven-time Grammy nominee, received a Pioneer Award from The Rhythm & Blues Foundation, won several Blues Music Awards and was inducted into The Blues Hall of Fame.
According to The Kate, she is one of very few of her contemporaries recording during the birth of soul music in the 1960s. She is still creating “vital” recordings today.
LaVette and her full band will be presenting songs from the new album, as well as some older favorites.
Kat Wright Trio
Next week, the Kat Wright Trio will appear April 4 at 7:30 p.m.
After touring for the last decade as a seven-to nine-piece soul band “with horns and keys blazing, this new era finds Kat Wright being born anew — more herself than ever — revealed simply in a startlingly honest and glimmering naked light,” according to a press release.
With restrictions imposed by the pandemic, Wright and her cohorts have recently come to enjoy writing and touring in a stripped-down formation, the news release said, mostly trio or quartet, in contrast to the big band she fronted for the better part of the last decade.
She has been described as “a young Bonnie Raitt
meets Amy Winehouse.”
Fans of Wright’s singing and style have been “thrilled” to discover this paired-down lineup, which puts the group’s “true talents front and center to shine, instead of drenching them in horns and fanfare,” the statement said.
Influences of Raitt and Winehouse are still present, the venue said, but also the likenesses of Brandi Carlisle and Norah Jones. “The resulting music is more intentional, more distilled, more potent: a direct balm for the trying times we face today.”
To purchase tickets for either show, visit thekate.org or call 860-510-0453.