Gregory Porter
‘I took that racist insult and bought my house with it’
Gregory Porter is a big, stocky, bearded middleaged jazz singer who wears a balaclava to cover facial scars. He is surely the unlikeliest pop star of the modern era. “I would say so,” he chuckles. “My friends from back home are like, what the hell happened?”
What happened is that people heard his voice. This week, after BBC Radio 2 broadcast Porter performing live at Maida Vale Studios, two of his albums jumped back into the top 15. That would be remarkable for a hot young pop tyro, but for an easy-listening jazz singer-songwriter it is unheard of. Porter did not even get started as a recording artist until he was hitting 40, when his independently released 2010 debut caught the ears of jazz aficionados. His 2013 major label album Liquid Spirit won a Grammy in America and became a crossover hit in the UK. This year’s follow up, Take Me to the Alley, was the first jazz album to break the British top five this decade.
The 45-year-old’s success is a wonderful reminder that the most important organ when it comes to judging music should always be our ears. “Time and time again I hear people tell me they don’t like jazz but they like this,” smiles Porter. “I’ve got to break it to them, well, you do like jazz, you just have a different idea of what you think it is. The umbrella is so wide, it’s got room to shelter all kinds of wonderful.” Porter blends jazz with soul and blues and the slightest shades of hip hop. “If it’s not pure jazz, it’s damn near next door, music from the same people in the same neighbourhood. One critic called me nothing but a blues singer, as though that was a slight. That is the highest compliment there is.”
Porter has become celebrated for his irresistible mellow baritone, a creamy mid-range voice that is thick and warm and easy on the ear, but what is sometimes overlooked is the quality of the songwriting. Porter’s musical style may be old-fashioned but he doesn’t depend on the standards of the Great American Songbook, instead writing his own beautifully crafted songs in the same idiom, with tantalising wordplay, grown-up subject matter and flowing melodies. Indeed, he started writing one during our interview.
“Can you just give me a second cos I thought of something,” he apologised as he returned from a toilet break, picking up his phone and gently crooning into it. “Don’t scratch me off your list / I may be coming / On the morning train / In the pouring rain.” He had indeed just arrived on a train from Heathrow airport in a torrential London downfall. It was me who got soaked cycling to our meeting, however, shamelessly dumping my dripping backpack and removing my shoes and socks to dry out while we chatted. So my ears pricked up when Porter extemporised: “With no shoes on my feet, with my pack on my back…” He drifted off. “Oh, I’ll figure it out. I don’t want you to hear me fumbling.”
Honestly, I could have listened all day. Porter burst into spontaneous song throughout our interview, snatches of gospel, jazz standards and excerpts from his own material. “You’ve got to catch it when it happens,” he says of his writing. “I’m not going to lie, I was on the toilet and the inspiration came to me, based on a thought I had about being in London, and whether I could scratch that off my list. We all have these lists about life, where to live, where to go and who to go with. I’ve scratched a few off lately.”
Porter frankly admits that, even as he pursued a musical career singing in cafes, bars, restaurants and clubs while working in New York as a chef, he never dreamed of the kind of stardom that has come his way. “I thought I had something to give,” he smiles. “But the places I find myself, they would have seemed out of the reach for a jazz singer. Waving to the Queen after singing Amazing Grace at Buckingham Palace, that was pretty cool.” Stevie Wonder has become a close friend who drops by for dinner in Porter’s house in California: “That’s just surreal to me. I’m going to get a grand piano for the living room, just so he has to play it.” At the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, Porter found himself being closely watched for the entire concert by a glowering figure in a black leather coat. Afterwards he introduced himself as Van Morrison. “He said, ‘Yeah, I really like that. You’re soulful man.’ This is the very fabric of my childhood. Those artists are still in the stratosphere to me.”
Towering over me at 6ft 3in, Porter has the good manners and grace of a gentle giant. His fascinating upbringing has already been oft told: raised in poverty with seven siblings, a preacher mother and absent father, an American college football career curtailed by injury, his mother’s deathbed encouragement to stick with music. The facial scars occurred when he was “seven or eight” (he avoids the subject of why he got them), but he insists that his appearance never inhibited him. “This has become my fashion and style,” he says of his balaclava. “I could go deeper. I had surgical scars and I decided to cover them, this felt comfortable, so this is how I decided to rock it. That could be true. But I just saw it one day and said ‘I’m gonna put this on, I like it.’ It was before the music career. I was making soup. I was talking to girls. ‘This is my look.’ And they were going ‘ooh, it’s different.’ ”
He admits he is not immune to insecurity but thinks it goes with the profession. “On stage, it’s very naked. There’s a reason you shake your knees. You’re very vulnerable, cos it’s just you, your body is the instrument. But I always had confidence in my voice, if I had the right song, the right words to sing.”
Porter is married with a young son. “They’re hanging in there with this career that keeps me on the road 300 days a year. Being a singer, it’s feast or famine. You have to hit it when it’s hot.” His songs reveal a lot about his life, about the racism he has suffered from, about the faith that has kept him buoyant, about the wisdom his late mother imparted, about the absence of his father and his own desire to be a better one.
“My personality is to absorb an experience, let it live in me. I’ve been treated like I was a piece of s---, but my protest and anger and pain has come out sometimes as beautiful songs.” He cites Our Love from his 2012 album, Be Good. “Walking in New York with my lady, minding our own business, enjoying a beautiful day, somebody walked past us and said ‘that’s a weird couple. She white, he black, he big, she little.’ I could have turned around and shown my anger but I let it stir inside. And I wrote a song about how the love we have is bigger than petty stones thrown at the gates of our castle. So when I see thousands of people singing that at a show, the slight has been conquered.
“It’s personal to me – I took that insult and I bought my house with that. I’ve been called n----- a thousand times, but I’ve turned it into my son’s college education. I feel righteous. And I feel lucky.”
‘I’m not going to lie, I was on the toilet and the inspiration for the song about being in London just came to me’