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scene nearly 20 years ago, fans of male vocal jazz
have been waiting for the next breakthrough artist.
Now he’s here.
A former college football player from
Southern California who wears a bushy beard
and a distinctive black-knit cap with a visor and
ear flaps, Gregory Porter has devoted most of
his albums and concerts to his own compositions,
which owe as much to Donny Hathaway
and Bill Withers as to George Gershwin and Jon
Hendricks.
Porter has won over a growing audience as
well as critics, who honored him as the top jazz
artist and male vocalist in the 2014 DownBeat
Critics Poll. (He topped the categories Rising
Star–Jazz Artist and Rising Star–Male Vocalist in
last year’s Critics Poll.) Porter became a star not by
consciously rebelling against business as usual but
by entering the jazz field as an outsider oblivious
to the unspoken rules.
“I had a healthy ignorance of what I should
do,” he sheepishly admitted. “My first record
company wanted me to do standards for my first
record. But I was writing and I said, ‘Let me sing
my own little songs and see what happens.’ I wanted
to try something new, something that was connected
to the tradition but maybe sung in a different
way. I know the audience isn’t supposed
to be the guide to the artist, but sometimes they
are. Before I made that first record, I was including
my own songs like ‘1960 What?’ in the same
sets with standards like ‘Moody’s Mood For
Love,’ and the audience was getting excited about
my songs. I think jazz fans were eager to hear
some different songs.”
The term “singer-songwriter” is most often
used in the folk and rock fields, but it fits Porter,
because his singing is shaped by the songs he
writes and vice versa. His latest album, Liquid
Spirit (Blue Note), and his two previous discs—
Water and Be Good, both on Motéma—have all
featured original material, and they’ve all received
glowing reviews.
In concert and in the studio, Porter’s voice
echoes the testifying fervor he learned at his
mother’s church in Bakersfield, Calif. It makes
sense that he would write songs with moral points
expressed in down-home metaphors. His lyrics
and melodies resemble the streetwise vernacular
of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, so it’s not surprising
that his vocals do as well.
“I’m still pulling from Stevie,” he said. “I’m
really dealing with the influences from my youth
to write new stories that reflect my personal issues.
What I do on Liquid Spirit is what we did every
Sunday morning, but now they play it on VH1
Soul next to Beyoncé, so it seems current. There’s
something in my music pop fans can relate to, but
then they say, ‘Why did you do that? Why didn’t
you do the second part the same way you did the
first part?’
“And I say, ‘Because I’m a jazz singer, so I’ll
deviate in the melody. I’ll sing ahead of the beat
or behind the beat; I’ll change the harmony. If it
feels free, it feels right.’ Last month’s concerts will
be a little different than next month’s concert,
because I’ll find something new in the melody or
something new in the lyric that I’ll emphasize. I
feel bad for pop singers [who are] expected to sing
the same song in the same way in the same key 20
years after it was a hit.”
Porter rejects the idea that he’s doing something
unprecedented in jazz. He regards vocal
jazz interpretations of songs by Wonder and The
Beatles during the 1960s and ’70s not as commercial
compromises, but as signposts pointing the
way forward. He notes that listeners sometimes
forget how artists like Leon Thomas, Andy Bey
and Etta Jones bridged the gap between the Great
American Songbook and soul music, not to mention
the obvious jazz influences heard in the music
of Hathaway, Gaye and Ray Charles.
“When you’re talking about that post-Civil
Rights, feel-good, looking-up music of Marvin
and Donny,” Porter said, “that existed in the music
of Leon, Andy and Esther Phillips. But it didn’t
seem to get the official stamp. It came out of that
gospel-soul tradition, so it might not have been
embraced by the jazz establishment. I would love
to have seen a show where Leon, Andy and Frank
Sinatra were on stage together, because that’s the
full spectrum of jazz vocals.”
DB