Find an event
Peven heaven
Peven Everett might be Chicago's most prolific musician.
Live improvisation and dance music don’t naturally go together (just try “jamming” on a Roland 808 drum machine). But in Peven Everett’s world, spontaneity and house rhythms go down smoother than cognac and Sprite. Then again, Everett’s far from your average club act: The multi-instrumentalist plays dance music with a live band, hops between guitar and keyboards midsong and changes up his original tunes on the fly while his band shifts behind him. On Wednesday 14, he’ll lead the band from a piano at Swank Society’s HotHouse Valentine’s get-together.
Hailing from Harvey, Illinois, Everett embraced jazz in the public school system and ended up a student teacher before he hit high school at Thornridge. Upon graduation, he turned down a full scholarship to Berkeley School of Music. Recommended as a sub trumpeter by jazzman Russell Gunn, he went on tour with bebop singer Betty Carter, playing his first out-of-town show ever at Carnegie Hall. Everett spent roughly seven years gigging out of New York, much of it playing with Branford Marsalis in the fusiony Buckshot LeFonque.
But eventually he realized the jazz world was too limiting. “I did my tenure at a particular level,” he tells us via cell phone between meetings and dropping off master tapes. “I needed to loosen my top button. I realized that I didn’t like the stuffiness of this community.”
Already dabbling in remixes for folk-soul strummer Terry Callier, he moved to Chicago in 1999 to regain his edge. “I was keen on finding what made New York like me so much since I wasn’t from there,” he says.
Everett’s years back in Chicago haven’t been wasted: It’s been a chance to “strip off my scales,” he says. He released 2002’s Studio Confessions following a series of homemade CDR albums and was, for a time, identified as a neosoul artist, à la D’Angelo or Maxwell. But Everett’s not so easy to peg, as he recently proved: In the last quarter of 2006, he self-released an astonishing seven albums of new material. “It was the stuff that I couldn’t get out of my head,” he explains. Now distributed through Groove, his seven discs are each compartmentalized explorations of specific genres: jazz, R&B, hip-hop, soul, house, bossa nova and swing.
Everett’s multi-instrumental abilities and digital home-recording setup allow him to immerse himself in solo sessions only to emerge days later with a finished album. The seven discs are available as MP3s (and as bulk discs) through peveneverett.tradebit.com. His label will issue vinyl singles from the discs within a month, which will be followed by full albums. (He wants a publishing deal for his catalog before going to the iTunes online store.)
But as prolific as he is, Everett is no stranger to making singles for the dance-club market. He guested on Roy Davis Jr.’s garage smash “Gabrielle” and had a solo house hit in 2003 with “I Can’t Believe I Used to Love Her.” Last year’s “Stuck” was a monster in the U.K. house world, and he’s a regular on fashionable house comps.
This year, Everett is pushing his album Power Soul, on Defected. “It’s based on rock, soul, R&B and house,” he says. “It’s a fusion of all of those. I’m trying to reestablish that big-band feeling where people would know the music was synonymous with dance, and merge that with the improvisational feel.”
With support from tastemakers like Gilles Peterson, Everett plays London clubs like Jazz Café, but his hometown hasn’t exactly known what to do with him. “I never looked for respect here. I knew that it wasn’t available,” he says, citing Chicago’s abundance of talent. In 2006, he got an Independent Achiever Award—not from the local music press, but from an international conglomerate, Heineken. Hustle, perhaps, knows hustle.
