MUSIC REVIEW : Etta James Bares Soul at Belly Up

SOLANA BEACH —  In a 90-minute performance Thursday night at the Belly Up Tavern, Etta James demonstrated why she is one of the few singers confident enough in her talent to dispense with music’s parliamentarian codes of form and conduct.

James seems to revel in taunting the gods of chance, as she did in a number of ways during this show, which proved to be one of the best she’s ever given here.

Though the R&B; belter’s natural context is the soul posse with a horn section, on her current tour she’s fronting the brass-less six-piece Roots Band, which consists of two keyboards, two guitars, bass and her son, Roger Hawkins, on drums. In a performance medium wherein salesmanship requires physical exertion, the hefty James spent much of the set seated center stage.

The unwritten manual of concert pacing dictates no more than one slow number in four or five, but James repeatedly strung together two and three consecutive slow blues or soul ballads, maintaining the taut tension on which this music thrives with the primal exclamations and sensuous expressiveness for which she is famous.

In response to James’ in-your-face bravado, a rabid, sold-out audience of 565 hollered, sang along, danced and did everything but wave palm fronds while the 54-year-old soulstress essayed new and old material with the zeal of one determined to build on, rather than rest on, past glories, which in her case are considerable.

James was 15 when performer-entrepreneur Johnny Otis discovered her in 1953. In the ensuing years, the half-Italian, half-African-American native of Los Angeles helped midwife both rhythm-and-blues and rock ‘n’ roll with a series of hits that included “Roll With Me, Henry” and “Good Rockin’ Daddy.”

She reached the pop charts and a new audience in the late ‘60s with “Tell Mama” and “Losers Weepers.” Many observers feel she would have given Aretha Franklin serious competition if it weren’t for a drug dependency that eventually derailed James’ career and landed her in a psychiatric hospital.

James re-emerged in the mid-’70s to little notice, but her reputation remained intact among R&B; cognoscenti. She performed at the 1977 Montreux Jazz Festival, and the Rolling Stones hired her to open several dates on their 1978 tour of the States. Though she hasn’t had a hit since the early ‘70s, James continues to record and tour. Her recent “Stickin’ to My Guns” album shows her in vintage form.

Part of the appeal of a James concert is her unpredictability. She can be moody, distant and dispirited, or she can be solicitous, playful and borderline raunchy. The latter James showed up Thursday in an elegant, spangles-on-black outfit, and immediately began toying with propriety and testing the crowd’s will.

Opening with the funky shuffle “Breakin’ Up Somebody’s Home,” from 1988’s great “Seven Year Itch” album, James prowled the stage, eliciting lascivious hoots both with her tongue acrobatics and with some creative use of the microphone.

But she was all business on her late-’60s hit, “I’d Rather Go Blind” (covered in 1972 by Rod Stewart). Seated, James poured herself into the slow blues, running with notes and kneading phrases as if to exorcise all remnants of lingering heartbreak.

After two more tracks from “Seven Year Itch”--the mid-tempo pop-soul “Damn Your Eyes” and the slower blues grinder “Come to Mama”--James stayed on the downbeat course with the latest album’s “Your Good Thing (Is About to End).” This time, she engaged in some vocal trade-offs with organist Mike Finnegan, and feigned anger when this Mose Allison look-alike’s blue-eyed soulin’ earned louder cheers than her efforts.

But pretense or not, the duel seemed to kick James into overdrive. On the next tune, Jimmy Reed’s “Baby, What You Want Me to Do,” she opened the pipes full blast. Before the song ended, James had soldered it to shards of Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City” and Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom” with blowtorch vocalizing that left even Finnegan shaking his head.

That projected sense of owning the moment, that talent for simultaneously personalizing the dramatic material of others while generating a powerful rhythmic momentum, is classic Etta James. She might have slipped and fallen in the late ‘60s, but right now, James is delivering the goods while Aretha’s delivering the pizzas.