Permanent Rotation: Jackie Queens

Permanent Rotation is a series in which producers, DJs, and musicians go deep on the albums that have inspired them.

Jackie Queens is a Zimbabwean-born, Cape Town-based house music vocalist and the founder of Bae Electronica, a record label and agency supporting Black femme talent in house music. Her chosen album is a lost neo-soul gem from a superlative artist who has yet to receive adequate recognition and compensation for his talent and contribution. 

Jackie Queens came across Peven Everett in the same way that most people in club music did — through his 1996 track “Gabriel”, with Roy Davis Jr., and especially the “Live Garage” mix. This was around 2004, when Jackie was living in London and the track was still popular on radio eight years after its release.

“I used to hear it all the time,” says Jackie. “From that point on, I just never stopped listening to everything he put out.”

LimeWire was the file-sharing site du jour at the time, and Jackie immediately downloaded Everett’s first album, Studio Confessions. Shortly thereafter, not long before she left the UK, Everett released Power Soul, and Jackie grabbed a copy on CD. “I cry every time I think about it because it doesn’t actually play anymore, but it’s got such a beautiful cover, it’s got this gold border on it,” she says. “I played it ALL the time.” 

Peven Everett is best known to club audiences as a vocalist, but he started out as a jazz musician. Born in Harvey, on the outskirts of Chicago, he was a prodigiously talented child who first took up the drums before becoming proficient in 13 instruments including guitar, keyboards, bass, trombone and trumpet. Everett would later receive a scholarship to study at Berklee School of Music, play at Carnegie Hall, and perform with jazz greats such as Betty Carter, Wynton Marsalis, and Branford Marsalis. 

Power Soul arrived at the tail end of neo-soul’s most popular era and was released on Soul Heaven, a now-defunct sublabel of Defected Records. A handful of the record’s twelve tracks bridge the gap between soul and soulful house music, including “Stuck”, its biggest track, “Can’t Do Without”, and “Just A Girl”.

“[Power Soul] is a good representation of who he [Peven] is as an artist — stylistically, from a writing perspective, and also in terms of his virtuosity,” says Jackie. “He’s definitely been someone who, while very revered and super prolific, always seemed like he was travelling on his own path and doing what he wanted to do.”

By his own estimation, Everett has self-released around 50-60 albums on his own Studio Confession label. Much of his music can be found and purchased directly from Peven.net. “Every year I do this thing where I share his catalogue on my [Instagram] stories because he’s honestly my favourite house music vocalist of all time,” says Jackie. “This guy makes so much music.”

Jackie has always been especially enamoured with the stylistic agility of Power Soul. “It’s a soul album, but it’s also a dance album with instrumentation, which is not something that you encounter so much in Afro-house and other dance-related genres,” she says. “If you listen to, “Just A Girl”, for instance, the guitar on that is insane, but it’s still a dance track. It’s not heavily electronic but it’s still dance, with a lot of soul and intensity and rhythm.”

As a singer, Jackie is naturally drawn to Everett’s voice, which he manipulates like an instrument. “He knows how to use it so well, in different modalities and different textures,” she says. “On some songs, his voice sounds like what a horn would sound like if you were playing it on the song.” 

Jackie names “Washing”, “Sexy Makeup”, “Stuck” and “Can’t Do Without” as her favourite songs on the album, noting Everett’s ability to shapeshift within the confines of each track. “He will start a song in one way and then two minutes in he’s changing the key or changing the tempo or even changing the genre,” she says. “He can go from gospel to jazz to a Latin flavour…he just has this really interesting way of making the song dynamic.”

Apart from his solo work, Everett has collaborated with many other musicians, most notably singing on Gorillaz’ “Strobelite” from their 2017 album Humanz. And yet he remains a curiously unsung artist, something that Jackie relates to as a house vocalist. She recalls Everett posting on social media a while back claiming that he wrote, sang and produced “Gabriel” and suggesting that he alone should be credited for it.

“It’s stuff that he speaks about in his music all the time, about how he’s had experiences in the music industry where people just take advantage of him,” she says. “I know what that feels like. Obviously, not at that scale, but there have definitely been times in my career where I haven’t pursued my music as much as I would like.”

Everett was recently diagnosed with lung cancer and a GoFundMe was launched to help pay for his treatment. In another year in which the premature passing of several artists has reminded us of our own transience, Jackie thinks it might be time to reach out to her idol and hear his story from the horse’s mouth. 

“You never really know what life journey people are on that either puts them on another path or obstructs the journey that they were on when you connected with them,” she says. “I’ve been wanting to reach out to him for a long time and now it’s even more critical. He’s my hero.” 

The GoFundMe to support Peven Everett’s cancer treatment is here.