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Since we caught up with Peven Everett in 2002, things done changed. After the release of Studio Confessions, the album that decisively shook the ‘neo’ out of soul, Peven returned to the UK the following year to perform a set of shows that blew away everyone’s preconceptions and traced out an entirely new direction for this singer/mutli-instrumentalist/producer/label-owner. With his band, Séance Divine, Peven heated up his hip-hop leanings to a house tempo, and was starting to run tracks like ‘Puerto Rico’, ‘Gabriel’ and ‘Kissing Game’ live and direct at 120bpm (all praise due to Larry Billups, the drummer of the trio, who puts the Energiser bunny to shame). Séance Divine have since been setting international festivals and club stages alight with that live house sound, which works just as well on the dancefloor as it does on stereo when you’re driving in your ghetto.
“There’s no rehearsal, none of that,” says Peven, speaking down the phone from his Chicago homestead. “And I never let the musicians know until five minutes before we hit the stage what we’re playing. And even when I tell them, they still don’t know because they know that I have the music in my head. Once they start figuring out what to do with the groove that I give them, their own professionalism has to come into play. It’s a big deal and that’s why you have to pick the best of the best to do this particular job. You need the best improvers, melodic enough to hold the structures together.”
The result is jazz, but not as we know it, and Peven is currently calling it ‘Power Soul’.
“I invented the whole ‘Power Soul’ thing to make sure that the improv thing didn’t go away from music, that people didn’t think of jazz as the only music that could have a little improv in it. You know rock does it all the time, getting away with it for four, five, sixteen bars… there’s gotta be something that makes all people equate to plain old melody without words. I think that’s got something to do with the improv. Don’t get rid of the improv, whatever you do.”
Read the full article in the November 2006 issue of Straight No Chaser |
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Words: INTERVEIW Amar Patel
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