Madeleine Peyroux & Bettye LaVette ‘Let’s Walk’ Tour
Thursday, March 20 and Friday, March 21, 2025
6:30 pm Doors // 7:30 pm Music
All Ages
$119 (+taxes/fees) Premium Seating
$99 (+taxes/fees) Preferred Reserved Seating
$79 (+taxes/fees) Advance General Admission // $89 (+taxes/fees) At The Door
Ticket purchases are final and non-refundable.
Facebook RSVP Thursday, Mar. 20
Facebook RSVP Friday, Mar. 21
Acclaimed jazz singer/songwriter Madeleine Peyroux returns to Minneapolis in support of her latest album, Let’s Walk, along with legendary soul artist Bettye LaVette, recognized as one of America’s finest vocalists and interpreters of song.
Two musical icons and two not-to-be-missed nights at The Parkway!
Thirty years after her formative busking days on the streets of Paris as a teenager, Madeleine Peyroux is the proud curator of nine beguiling albums and an accomplished performer with sell-out worldwide tours under her belt. Her extraordinary journey is one of the music industry’s most compelling, continuing to challenge the confines of jazz, venturing into the fertile fields of contemporary music with unfading curiosity.
“Let us advance our mortal bodies up
Where hearts and minds will go
Let’s walk, let’s roll.”
So sings Madeleine Peyroux on the upbeat title track of her captivating ninth album, Let’s Walk, the acclaimed singer-songwriter’s most assured, courageous work to date. Powered by the distinctive, honeyed croon that delivered her from the Paris streets to concert halls, these ten unabashedly personal songs, all co-written by the versatile Peyroux, deftly interweave jazz, folk, and chamber pop, with themes ranging from the confessional to the political, from whimsy to yearning. In every note, Peyroux digs deep, rendering this exquisite work with the disarming grace and gravitas of an artist in peak form.
For the ardently civic-minded Peyroux, Let’s Walk continues the scintillating conversation with her audience – and with the world at large. “This music is part of a dialogue,” she says. “That’s what art is. It’s engagement, community. I believe more than anything in getting together with people and listening to music and conversing. Music is the only way I’ve ever built community.”
Let’s Walk was a long time coming, but well worth the wait. Following Peyroux’s 2018 album, Anthem, the enforced isolation of the global pandemic made any real-time community gathering impossible. From a creative standpoint, however, Covid offered Peyroux a silver lining: she seized the opportunity to hunker down with longtime collaborator, multi-instrumentalist Jon Herington (Steely Dan, Lucy Kaplansky). The pair reflected on the seismic era at hand and wrote and re-wrote in what Peyroux calls “a shadow of reckoning.” When multi-Emmy-and-Grammy-winning producer Elliott Scheiner (Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles) heard a sampling of the new material, he mandated “no covers” for the album. The longtime studio veteran knew the time was ripe to highlight Peyroux’s incisive, often topical lyrics meshed with Herington’s ear for melody and arrangements.
When the road beckons this spring, Peyroux’s community of loyal fans is in for a treat. Thanks to serendipitous delay, and her collaborators Herington and Scheiner, the spare, slow burning Let’s Walk material will be set free in venues around the world, effortlessly dovetailing with Peyroux’s beloved versions of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Tom Waits (to name a few) classics. As she learned in her busking years, a great song can wield powerful magic, and inspire the best in any type of crowd. With Let’s Walk, Madeleine Peyroux takes full ownership of that magic.
Hailed by the New York Times as “one of the great soul interpreters of her generation,” Bettye LaVette is a true legend with a musical career spanning more than 60 years. Now rightly recognized as one of the finest vocalists and one of the great interpreters of song, her discography spans five decades, but it is within the past decade that she has finally been recognized as one of America’s finest vocal talents. George Jones proclaimed, "Bettye is truly a singer's singer."
Her career began in 1962, at 16 years old, in Detroit, Michigan. Her first single,
My Man-He's A Lovin' Ma,” was on Atlantic Records. Throughout the 60s and 70s, she recorded for several major labels and also appeared in the Broadway musical Bubbling Brown Sugar alongside Honi Coles and Cab Calloway.
The 2000s started what she calls her "Fifth Career." She received the Rock & Blues Foundation's Pioneer Award, won several Blues Music Awards, was inducted into The Blues Hall Of Fame, received the Legacy Award from the Americana Music Association, and has received 7 Grammy Nominations.
Her most recent release, LaVette!, consists of all songs written by Randall Bramblett, whom she considers "the best writer I have heard in the last 30 years."
According to Steve Jordan, who produced her last three albums: “When Bettye gets a hold of a song, it becomes her song. It’s like she wrote it. She’s a great messenger, a communicator, an interpreter. Bettye LaVette is like a combination of Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis."
Now, at 78 years old and in her 62nd year in show business, 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.