Tina Turner, Betty Davis and Macy Gray: get out of this voice! As easy as it may seem to reduce Bette Smith to her three prestigious elders, it is impossible not to include her in the family of soul music tigresses, tamers of gospel, able to irrupt like a volcano at the snap of a finger. With Jetlagger, the New Yorker from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, offers an album of pure Southern soul, which she masterfully dips in a boiling bath of 70s blues rock and 60s psychedelic rock. The spirit of Stax is ever present, particularly as Jetlagger was recorded in the dampness of Memphis, a pure groove feast featuring covers of the Staple Singers’ City In The Sky, Isaac Hayes’ Do Your Thing and, more surprising, I Found Love by the brilliant Lone Justice. More rock’n’roll than Sharon Jones, Bette Smith makes a devastating entrance onto the purist soul scene, far from the moulding the genre is often subjected to… © MZ/Qobuz