Jimetta Rose is an artist from Los Angeles who has been putting out music for fifteen years. Her last album, The Light Bearer, came out in 2016. She is now back with a project that began in 2014, The Gift – Around The Way Queen.

The roots of the project techincally goes back even further than 2014, because Jimetta Rose and DJ House Shoes actually first met when they teamed up to make the track “Castles” on House Shoes’ 2012 album, Let It Go. House Shoes then sought to launch his own label, Street Corner Music, with a series of ten beat tapes from lesser known producers, which was titled The Gift. Having really liked working with Rose, House Shoes then came up with the idea that she could pick a beat from each volume and write and record to it. They soon got to work, with Rose selecting the beats that spoke to her, and she began recording her vocals in Tenacity’s apartment in Glendale. Everything was going great until it came time to mix and master the album, when they realized that a lot of these beats were dusty, lo-fi beats made by up-and-coming producers who recorded to two-track WAVs or directly to mp3 and didn’t have stems. This sent the project into limbo for some time as it got passed around from engineer to engineer, who all shrugged and said they couldn’t get it where it needed to be. Finally, House Shoes reached out to a friend back in Detroit – Mags, the in-house engineer for The Disc in Eastpointe. He had dealt with similar projects before, and before they knew it, the project had finally been resuscitated and is now out for the world to hear.

For this project, Jimetta Rose is working with beats from Nameless, Dert Beats, EXT. TUAMIE, T-White, Cream Of Beats, Shoes, Raj Mahal, Denmark Vessey, DRUGS BEATS, Joseph Leimberg and I-Ced. Yes, the beats might have been a little dusty, but because these beats are also clever, inventive, and soulful, that becomes part of their charm. There are some really interesting turns over the course of the album, from Nameless reinterpreting a classic samba song to Dert Beats’ interesting take on a soul ballad. For the majority of the album, though, we’re getting music that can largely be classified as neo-soul, with some great downtempo tracks with stellar grooves that set up Rose on the microphone perfectly. Rose has a beautiful tone to her voice as she sings, and she channels a lot of Badu’s jazz inflections and vibrato when she’s in these intimate moments. However, that’s not all there is to Rose. At times, she brings out a bad bitch like Betty Davis, with a nice growl to her voice, and other times she can get more avantgarde and reach back to Minnie Riperton or Roberta Flack with her arrangements. There are also a few key moments when she can let it all hang out and belt some soul, such as on “Splatter.” Whatever it is, you can be sure that Rose is keeping it interesting, soulful, and giving a hundred percent of herself to the music.

It might have taken a long time to get here, but The Gift – Around The Way Queen was well worth the wait. Jimetta Rose is a unique talent, and she takes each of these beats to new and interesting places that will move your soul.