SPACE FOR OPTIMISM
U.S. jazz singer Gregory Porter attempts to hang on to what is important in his life
Gregory Porter has been thinking a lot about space recently. Last month the jazz singer sang America the Beautiful (via the internet) at the launch of NASA’s latest rocket to Mars, while the video for his recent single Concorde saw the 48-year-old don a space suit and go on an interplanetary adventure with his seven-year-old son, Demyan.
Like many children, Porter wanted to be an astronaut growing up. His class would watch space shuttle launches at school, and sometimes the returning orbiters would land near his childhood home in Bakersfield, Calif. His heroes were Buzz Aldrin and Ron McNair, the African-American astronaut killed in the Challenger disaster in 1986.
“I don’t pretend to be a scientist or have any in-depth knowledge of the stars, but I’m fascinated and inspired by space,” Porter says.
Porter is used to dizzying heights. His voice has made an unlikely star of the burly 6-foot-3 singer, who is never seen in public without his black peaked hat and open balaclava, worn to cover childhood surgical scars.
His major label debut, 2013’s Liquid Spirit, became the most streamed jazz album of all time, and his past two albums have reached the top five in the U.K. album charts, seeing him jockey for position with such mainstream pop acts as Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran. He has sung for the Queen and won two Grammy Awards.
Porter’s fixation with flight infuses his new album, All Rise. You suspect one aspect of space flight is playing on his mind: escape.
Although his sixth album was recorded before the coronavirus upended everyone’s lives, Porter is only too aware of the problems affecting planet Earth right now. Space is the most cheery place to be.
“We have to get out of 2020,” he laughs. “What a year. I just want to cuss right now.”
Porter has had a devastating few months.
One of eight siblings, he lost his brother Lloyd to complications due to COVID-19 in May. His sister Patrice died shortly after, from breast cancer.
“There are six of us now. We are very close ... (It’s been) very difficult,” he says.
Professionally, Porter estimates he has cancelled or rescheduled more than 100 concerts due to the pandemic, including four nights at the Royal Albert Hall.
He is, though, an optimist. Since his voice is often called “creamy” and the experience of listening to him sing is compared to “taking a bath,” it would be difficult for him to sound downbeat. It’s as if nothing bad could ever happen when he’s singing. He’s a snug sonic shield.
This positive nature, he says, comes from his late mother, Ruth, a minister who brought the children up single-handedly. They grew up in near poverty, attending church and steeped in gospel music. Porter excelled at football at high school and had dreams of turning professional, but a shoulder injury ended that and, instead, he moved to New York with Lloyd, where he worked in his brother’s restaurant and indulged his passion for singing.
A weekly residence at the (now closed) St. Nick’s Pub in Harlem led to a deal with independent
U.S. record label Motema before he signed with Blue Note/Decca in 2013.
But despite Porter’s innate optimism, there is grit in his voice when the conversation turns to the coming U.S. election. The vote has to be a “profound slam dunk and rebuke of who (Donald Trump) is”, says Porter (we’re speaking before Joe Biden announced Porter’s own state’s senator, Kamala Harris, as his running mate but you suspect he’d agree with her assertion that the election is a “battle for the soul” of America).
Rather than galvanize love across America, Trump sows division, Porter says. This is why at the NASA launch he sang the line in America the Beautiful about brotherhood uniting his country “from sea to shining sea” in hope rather than as fact. You could hear the plea in Porter’s voice. “Yeah, I took my time with that line,” he says.
Porter knows racism. Police frisked him 18 times when at high school. Police assume that arresting a Black person will have no consequences: “The assumption is that this person has no family of any standing, that they have no money, they have no lawyer. (It’s) the idea that you are ‘less than.’” This simply doesn’t happen with white people.
Will Porter ever perform without his trademark headgear? “Will you ever see me with my dreadlocks? Maybe (on) my final tour,” he says.
“You’re the first, maybe the second, person I’ve told. How long? Maybe 10 to 14 inches.”
He can’t wait to get back on the road. Despite the world’s woes, he knows music will endure. “When we get out of this thing, people are going to need music to dance to, to make love to, to party to, to commute to. Grandma’s going to want to sit with her grandbabies. And what’s that playing in the background? Music.”
And Porter will be there, spreading his own brand of positivity. “There are some artists who want to pick out the bad stuff in life. They want to have a bad day damn near every day. But that’s not me,” he says. “That’s not me.”
London Daily Telegraph