“I’m sorry ’bout the Cubs, y’all,” says Peven Everett from behind his Roland keyboard. “But I don’t believe in curses.”
He’s also released nearly all his work himself, on CD-R with minimal packaging, despite interest from labels on both sides of the Atlantic. He did emerge briefly from the deep underground last year with Studio Confessions, for which he and DJ Beni B cherry-picked the best songs from his other releases. The collection, licensed to Beni B’s ABB imprint in the U.S. and Diaspora in the UK, is his only widely available album; it’s sold more than 25,000 copies to date.
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He grew up in south suburban Harvey, where he soaked up jazz and gospel, Miles and Mahalia. “Also, I loved Aretha Franklin,” he adds. “I was a little kid when the Blues Brothers movie came out and [when] I saw her…that was it! That hooked me to a certain feeling of music with my people.”
The youngest of four children, Everett was only nine when his brother, Theo, was murdered during a convenience store holdup. “He was going out for a pack of cigarettes at like 12:30 at night. It happened right down by our house,” he says. “They robbed him, and he gave them the money. Later, the [murderer] said he saw in my brother’s face that he knew he was gonna kill him. My brother took off running and tried to zigzag as much as he could, but he still got hit. From where we lived we heard the [shot]. He tried struggling home, but he died three or four houses away from our place.
Everett told Berklee no thanks and headed to New York to join Carter’s sextet. “It was a hard decision, but I felt like that was a better school to go to at the time than Berklee,” he says. “It was the best learning I could’ve gotten in a short amount of time. I mean, I was barely 17 and my first show with her was at Carnegie Hall! That’s an education.”
Through fellow trumpeter (and Illinois native) Russell Gunn, Everett then landed another prestigious gig, touring with Wynton’s brother Branford. But he’d started to grow disillusioned with the purist tendencies of Wynton Marsalis’s New York.
His homecoming ushered in the next phase of his career: “I was hitting the dance clubs pretty heavy, getting into that whole scene, and I wanted to apply what I was learning in a way that was constructive.”
