Everette De Van, Musician, Teacher, and Mentor by Roger Atkinson Photography by Diallo French

I want everyone to sit back and think about this: How often do you hear organists (the mighty Hammond B-3 variet y) work with vocalists? Think through the famous organists: Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Charles Earland, Groove Holmes, Don Patterson, Larry Young, and Jack McDuff…. Some occasional sessions with vocalists, maybe? Maybe just a couple of instances? Well, tenor saxophonist Houston Person and the late Etta Jones often had an organist in the band, which surely counts. But I think you get the point, it is not a common combination. But the combination has long been a part of the world of Everette DeVan. “Carol Comer started working with the Means-DeVan trio many years ago”, Everette shared with me in a phone interview. “She was really the first great jazz vocalist I worked with. Carol was probably the most instrumental in teaching me how to back up a female vocalist. Carol also plays piano. She taught me what a vocalist needs to hear as far as voicing is concerned, how to hide their intro note in the instrumental introduction, because some vocalists like to hear that note. Just a few tips like that. Carol worked in the band, with myself, Kent Means on vibes, and Rusty Tucker on drums and trumpet. She worked with us off an on for maybe five or six years, back in the mid 1970s. I came to Kansas City in 1968.

“Playing for a vocalist on organ and piano is not much different. The keyboards are the same. The sound is much richer from the organ, it can take a vocalist used to working with a piano a while to get used to that. It’s like having an orchestra behind you! Once they get used to working with an organ, when the go back to working with a piano they kind of miss it.

“After some time we changed the name of the band to ssSlick. It was Kent and I, Marvin Jones played drums, Clive Renfro on guitar and vocals. He has since moved to Bethany, Missouri. He had a unique voice; he was a white guy and sounded like Brook Benton. A great voice. We were at the Epicurean Lounge for eight and a half years, doing both the Saturday and Sunday afternoon jazz jam session. The first lady who came in there to sing with us was Mary Moore. She was one of the ladies in the original group The Wild Women. She was with us for about two years. She left and went to New York and won first place for the talent show for Showtime at the Apollo.

“When Mary left I started my association with Lisa Henry. Her mother brought her to the club; Lisa was too young to be in there at the time. Her mother comes up and asks, ‘Can my little girl come up and sing?’ You don’t know what to expect in these situations! Well, Lisa comes in, she knew what she wanted to sing, and she knew what key she wanted to sing it in. The song was “Summertime”. That really impressed me. Most singers that come up at a jam session, they don’t know what they want to sing, maybe they have an idea, but they won’t know the key. Anyway, she comes in and sings a couple songs, and I offered her a job! She worked with us at the Epicurean for over three years. She improved by leaps and bounds, and she entered a Thelonious Monk vocal competition. She came in second place out of 107 countries! The State Department sent us on a couple of tours to Africa as a result of the award, representing the United States. We were in Madagascar and some African countries. It was a great experience. This would have been in the late 1990s.”

It was with Lisa that DeVan started becoming a teacher and mentor for singers. “My career took a turn here”, he said, “because of her success. I started to get inquiries from other female singers.”

During this time, Lisa was not the only singer Everette was working with. “I was also working with Lori Tucker, this actually started before I worked with Lisa. We’ve been friends and workmates for over thirty years, I’ve known her for about as long as I’ve known Kent Means.” Lori was with Everette when we came to town in 1997, where they worked at Jules’ on the Plaza among other places.

“Of course, I also worked with Millie Edwards during this time, and then with Sharon Thompson at the Peachtree. Sharon decided to go into a music ministry, and that’s all she does now, sing for the church. That’s where her heart is.”

“Eboni Fondren had been coming around. She started coming down to Jilly’s on Broadway when we had the jam sessions there. Eboni and Matt Hopper, I met them both at Jilly’s. She knew two songs when she came in. She started coming to me for vocal coaching and lessons. She now has a repertoire of well over two hundred tunes. So when Sharon decided to stop working, the Peachtree management said, ‘What about Eboni? Just bring her on board.’ So that’s when we started working together.

“About a year later, I met Christy Meinhardt at a jam session. She had been a student of Carol Comer’s. Carol told her that she had taught her as much as she could, and that she needed practical experience, and suggested that she find me! I think this as at Harling’s. She sat in there, and also sat in at the Phoenix. Then she started to come to me for vocal coaching, we started building her repertoire, and she has a fairly large repertoire now.

Working with Christy at MelBee’s, Everette played piano rather than organ. “It’s what they had; it would not have been practical to have an organ there. I’d rather play organ. The Phoenix could be impractical, too, and obviously downstairs at the Majestic or the Plaza III, not going to use an organ there! I used to carry that organ up and down the stairs at the Plaza III, I won’t do that anymore. Age is a factor in that. I’ll take a smaller keyboard for something like that; it has a pretty good replication of the B-3 organ sound. But nothing sounds like a B-3! If you want that sound, you really have to deal with this instrument!”

Everette has worked with male vocalists through the years, too. In addition to Clive Renfro, there’s been Richard Ross. “You know, he and Lou Rawls recorded for the Budweiser ads, but they took Lou because he had the big name. He was like next in line, if their association ever ended with Lou. That in itself was a great compliment. And I’ve known Duck Warner since I came to Kansas City.”

So what does Everette work on with vocalists, in addition to repertoire? “Repertoire is definitely something we work on. I try to steer them to things that have not been overdone. “Summertime”, “Misty”, “Green Dolphin Street”, they are great tunes, and I’ll introduce them to these songs, but really later on. First we’ll learn things that are not as popular, have not received as much airplay. I’ll introduce them to other singers. I introduced Eboni to Sarah Vaughan. I introduced Christy to Shirley Horn. I introduced both to Diana Krall. Diana’s idols were Nat King Cole on piano and Ernestine Anderson on vocals, so we’ve listened to Ernestine, too.

It is also important to do things to allow the singer’s own voice to emerge. “Nine times out of ten, when I introduce a singer to another vocalist, they’ll try to mimic them. It’s natural. At some point you just have to say ‘that’s enough of that, now you do it’. One thing I’ll do is change the tempo of the tune completely, maybe from a medium swing to a sensuous bossa nova. This will require completely different phrasing, to think about the same tune in a different way.

I’ve been doing that for years with vocalists. I’ll change it from night to night, the same song. We’ll also hear how different singers handle time, singers that sing on the beat or follow behind a little.” Over the years, the work with vocalists has changed DeVan’s approach somewhat. Whereas at one time he sought out unique instrumentals, he finds that he now seeks more obscure vocals to introduce to Christy and Eboni. “I had a chance to work with Frankie Laine a number of years ago, when he came to town to open a new hotel. He was a prolific songwriter, and his first tune I was not able to find. Rajean (another talented local singer who is a friend of Everette’s) found his Web site, and you could download the song.”

There are other singers in the DeVan family. He has known and worked with Diane Ray forever (“we met when we were both doing the Holiday Inn / Ramada Inn circuit”), and also Lloyd Schad, who was on the This is ssSlick LP that the Means-DeVan group recorded. And he recently worked with Dave Rizer, Jr. at the Coleman Hawkins festival (“he’s a natural scatter”). Plus, there’s Lauren Manley, who was frequently at Jilly’s with Everette and then left town for a few years but has recently returned and will probably be standing by the B-3 in the near future.

Everette is always busy. He is currently playing at the Juke House on 18th and Highland every Saturday from 3:00 to 7:00 p.m. He also normally does the late set at the Mutual Musicians Foundation from 1:00 to 5:00 a.m. Friday nights (really Saturday morning!). “Sometimes this is where I meet some of the younger vocalists, sometimes they are coming out of college, or Bobby Watson sends them to me. He sent tenor saxophonist Matt Carrillo to me.”). And there are frequent gigs at the Blue Room, and he and Eboni will be at the new Peach Tree downtown when they open soon.

When I told Everette that I’d be talking to some of the people he discussed in the interview, he told me that “they’ll say I’m a tyrant!” and quickly adds that “they’ll say it works.”

Eboni Fondren

“I’ve been working with Everette for about five years, and it’s been a blast! It’s fun and a great learning experience. You have to stay on your toes with him, always be listening. When I started out I didn’t know anything about gigging, and knew two jazz songs, despite having a fairly musical background in high school and college. Playing in a group like that was new to me. He took me under his wing, threw stuff at me left and right… you couldn’t ask for a better situation. When I first started with him, he said I needed to learn at least seventy five tunes before I could work with him. So we met once a week, and selected and learned songs. Jazz, blues, obscure things that no one was doing.

“I was going to Jardine’s a few years back when they had late Saturday jams, and someone recommended that I sit in with Everette at Jilly’s. So I took my two songs and sat in with Everette, and asked if could study with him, and we got started.

“He has also been a great friend. If I need someone to talk to, Everette is there for me, I can go to him for advice, and he is a kind of mentor, beyond music.” In addition to her work with Everette, Eboni appears around town with Bill Laursen and the Boulevard Big Band.

In addition to her work with Everette, Eboni appears around town with
Bill Laursen and the Boulevard Big Band.

Christy Meinhardt

“Working with Everette is exhilarating. I’ve learned a lot about the business aspects of music. He’s given me a lot of opportunities, and I am really grateful for that. I saw him first at a Mama Ray jam, then at the Phoenix. He started coaching me and working on new material, and then started giving me jobs. So we’ve been working together for about two and a half years. It’s been the most positive thing that’s happened to me in my life.

“I’ve been singing my whole life, at high school and at the Conservatory. I had studied with Carol Comer for about five months in the late 1970s. In 2004 I ran into her and started going to her again. She told me that I was ready and needed to go out and work, which is when I started to go to the jams and this led to Everette. “His training isn’t technical, he really helps you find the groove, the jazz phrasing… I had sung in choirs and all, but jazz is different, I had to learn to mellow out and relax. It’s allowed me to express myself; I love how it is ‘in the moment’. Just exhilarating.”

Carol Comer

“Previously, the only organs I’d ever sung with were those which accompanied church choirs, (my) church solos, my siblings & my church trio...time spent as a preacher’s kid, later a preacher’s mom’s kid, a kid who spends every waking moment either in school or church. It was a treat to be able to hear standards and especially the Blues ooze out of Everette’s B-3 and it was great fun singing with him. I’d respond to his (musical) orneriness, as would he to mine. Everette, Kent, Rusty, and I were a Vegas lounge act in disguise, and a darned good jazz ensemble as well. He could produce (and still does) the funkiest sound from that monster, and I loved vocally toying with that.

“I have never observed him as a teacher but I certainly have listened to what he’s produced: his students are fabulous. When the tribute for him was held at the Blue Room, Everette’s stable of singers blew everybody away. Christy had worked with me for a while and I always knew she had a great voice and good instincts but that day she sang her fanny off.”

Lori Tucker

“I first met Everette in October, 1976. I had been working for two years at the Ramada at I-35 and 87th Street. But the band broke up, and about a week later his agent, Jerry Plantz, called and wanted to know if I was still at the Ramada. He had a band that needed a singer immediately, that night. He suggested I go and sing a couple of songs with the band, see how it goes. I asked where they were playing, he says the Top of the Crown. It was a jazz band! I had been singing top forty, never sang jazz before.

“But over the years I had listened to a lot of my mother’s albums, and had learned songs that I didn’t realize that I knew. I had seen the names Everette DeVan, Kent Means, and Rusty Tucker in the paper, but had never met them. So I sat in, and after the third song he asked if I wanted the job. That was the beginning of a whole new era of my life. I had no idea that we were going to be like family for the rest of our lives.

“He taught me a lot about jazz. I found out that I knew some songs, but he knew so much, and it was really new to me. He introduced me to so many people, everyone in the jazz community. When we’d finish at the Top of the Crown, we’d go to the Musician’s Union, stay all night. Everybody would go then, it was a very rich experience, I became acquainted with people who I would have never met, like Baby Lovett, Piggy Minor, and George Salisbury.

“Over the years, we’ve been more like family than friends. We can call at any time; we’ve laughed together and cried together, experienced joys and sorrows together. I really value the relationship, I truly do.

“One thing you don’t want to get is ‘the look’. If you miss a queue, you get the look. No one has to tell you that you sang the wrong note, came in at the wrong spot, or sang the wrong verse. You know. Don Glaza, the drummer, he had tee shirts made up with a caricature drawn on front of Everette giving the look.”