Peven Everett

Not many people can claim to have kick-started a whole genre but Illinois multi-instrumentalist Peven Everett has a pretty good case. His vocals on Roy Davis Jr.'s dance floor filler "Gabrielle" turned out to be an important catalyst in the UK garage phenomenon. However Everett defies easy categorisation. Everett possesses impressive jazz pedigree having worked with the late Betty Carter and the Marsalis clan, yet he's also self-released an album of Brazilian rhythms and recorded several deep house tracks. On this release, he opts to mesh his feathery vocal style against soulful mid-tempo bassy backdrops making for a pleasurable contrast. "Testin' Me" is perhaps the best example of this here, but this approach strung out for the duration with few variations in tempo and topics leads to the material occasionally getting too repetitive. It would have served him well to draw on his obvious musical breadth to avoid this issue. Despite this, Everett's undeniable skill as a producer and arranger is on display identifying him as a prodigious musical talent and it seems only a matter of time before a musical document confirming this emerges.