Madeleine Peyroux & Bettye LaVette: Let’s Walk Tour 2025

Madeleine Peyroux is an American jazz singer and songwriter who began her career as a teenager on the streets of Paris.

“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.”

Bettye LaVette was hailed by The New York Times as “one of the great soul interpreters of her generation.” George Jones said “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’ Man,” was on Atlantic Records. Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, she recorded for several major labels. She also appeared in the Broadway Musical Bubbling Brown Sugar alongside Honi Coles and Cab Calloway.

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.