THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

We at Music Geekery can hardly feign anything approaching surprise when the agendas of art-for-art's sake and the Grammy awards fail to dovetail, but usually they're not even close. When prefab popsters A, B, & C are the only ones in the running, it's no skin off our aesthetic apple which one wins. But when they wave it in our faces, when they come so tantalizingly close to recognizing substance over style, it's difficult not to kvetch. So as happy we were for old-school soul comeback queen Bettye Lavette when she got her Grammy nomination, we were twice as scandalized when she didn't walk away with the golden gramophone. Instead, the award for Best Contemporary Blues album went to J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton for Road To Escondido. Now look, we've got nothing but love for Cale, and nothing in particular against Clapton, and we experienced no overt spasms of pain upon initially listening to the duo's aforementioned effort, but it's a largely unremarkable affair whose main purpose is to convince Starbucks-bound, NPR-addicted muppies that their childhood hero is still cool because he's working with some guy who never had his own VH1 Classic special. And those supporters still stand no better chance of making it through Escondido awake than you or I.

And then there's the scandalously uncrowned soul queen, Ms. Lavette. The lady spent the last several decades singing her butt off to little acclaim. Finally, a couple of years ago, her "comeback" album I've Got My Own Hell To Raise brought her profile up to the proper level. Her emotionally naked, supremely soulful work received accolade after accolade at last. And the follow-up, The Scene of the Crime, proved to be just as rewarding. Ironically enough, the Muscle Shoals-recorded album's title refers to the fact that Lavette first recorded in the legendary music town in the early '70s, only to have her work buried by Atlantic (and finally released decades later on a European label). Surely it's the height of effrontery then, that some 35 years later she should personally and artistically transcend what she attested was a truly traumatic experience, only to be seduced and abandoned by the bozos at the Grammys. Fortunately for us (and her), in the end it means diddley, and we've still got a thrilling emotional rollercoaster ride available to us all when we visit The Scene of the Crime.