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scene nearly 20 years ago, fans of male vocal jazzhave been waiting for the next breakthrough artist.Now he’s here.A former college football player fromSouthern California who wears a bushy beardand a distinctive black-knit cap with a visor andear flaps, Gregory Porter has devoted most ofhis albums and concerts to his own compositions,which owe as much to Donny Hathawayand Bill Withers as to George Gershwin and JonHendricks.Porter has won over a growing audience aswell as critics, who honored him as the top jazzartist and male vocalist in the 2014 DownBeatCritics Poll. (He topped the categories RisingStar–Jazz Artist and Rising Star–Male Vocalist inlast year’s Critics Poll.) Porter became a star not byconsciously rebelling against business as usual butby entering the jazz field as an outsider obliviousto the unspoken rules.“I had a healthy ignorance of what I shoulddo,” he sheepishly admitted. “My first recordcompany wanted me to do standards for my firstrecord. But I was writing and I said, ‘Let me singmy own little songs and see what happens.’ I wantedto try something new, something that was connectedto the tradition but maybe sung in a differentway. I know the audience isn’t supposedto be the guide to the artist, but sometimes theyare. Before I made that first record, I was includingmy own songs like ‘1960 What?’ in the samesets with standards like ‘Moody’s Mood ForLove,’ and the audience was getting excited aboutmy songs. I think jazz fans were eager to hearsome different songs.”The term “singer-songwriter” is most oftenused in the folk and rock fields, but it fits Porter,because his singing is shaped by the songs hewrites and vice versa. His latest album, LiquidSpirit (Blue Note), and his two previous discs—Water and Be Good, both on Motéma—have allfeatured original material, and they’ve all receivedglowing reviews.In concert and in the studio, Porter’s voiceechoes the testifying fervor he learned at hismother’s church in Bakersfield, Calif. It makessense that he would write songs with moral pointsexpressed in down-home metaphors. His lyricsand melodies resemble the streetwise vernacularof Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, so it’s not surprisingthat his vocals do as well.“I’m still pulling from Stevie,” he said. “I’mreally dealing with the influences from my youthto write new stories that reflect my personal issues.What I do on Liquid Spirit is what we did everySunday morning, but now they play it on VH1Soul next to Beyoncé, so it seems current. There’ssomething in my music pop fans can relate to, butthen they say, ‘Why did you do that? Why didn’tyou do the second part the same way you did thefirst part?’“And I say, ‘Because I’m a jazz singer, so I’lldeviate in the melody. I’ll sing ahead of the beator behind the beat; I’ll change the harmony. If itfeels free, it feels right.’ Last month’s concerts willbe a little different than next month’s concert,because I’ll find something new in the melody orsomething new in the lyric that I’ll emphasize. Ifeel bad for pop singers [who are] expected to singthe same song in the same way in the same key 20years after it was a hit.”Porter rejects the idea that he’s doing somethingunprecedented in jazz. He regards vocaljazz interpretations of songs by Wonder and TheBeatles during the 1960s and ’70s not as commercialcompromises, but as signposts pointing theway forward. He notes that listeners sometimesforget how artists like Leon Thomas, Andy Beyand Etta Jones bridged the gap between the GreatAmerican Songbook and soul music, not to mentionthe obvious jazz influences heard in the musicof Hathaway, Gaye and Ray Charles.“When you’re talking about that post-CivilRights, feel-good, looking-up music of Marvinand Donny,” Porter said, “that existed in the musicof Leon, Andy and Esther Phillips. But it didn’tseem to get the official stamp. It came out of thatgospel-soul tradition, so it might not have beenembraced by the jazz establishment. I would loveto have seen a show where Leon, Andy and FrankSinatra were on stage together, because that’s thefull spectrum of jazz vocals.”DB