Gregory Porter, interview: Nat King Cole was the first Barack Obama

The jazz giant sat down with David Ellis to talk race, his mother and what music is doing to his family
David Ellis @dvh_ellis28 September 2016

Thirty-three seconds after I meet him, Gregory Porter begins to sing.

It’s a throwaway line, a made-up riff about the Serpentine, but the air briefly shakes with that voice, the one which sounds like old polished timber, that won him a Grammy and took him from a childhood of racial hatred in Bakersfield, California – one night a six foot cross burned outside his bedroom window – to worldwide recognition.

“I took a stroll last night around Piccadilly and Soho and was hard pressed to find a corner where somebody wouldn’t ask me for a photo or start singing to me. The taxi driver just now was screaming at me ‘Young man…’ Terrible voice but..!”

He laughs, which he does a lot: he is as you’d hope, warm and open and friendly, perhaps a little surprised that a well-tailored 44-year-old jazz singer is a hit in 2016 (“50,000 at Hyde Park is a long way from 18 people in a small Harlem jazz club!”). Success first came in 2010, but this year has been his best with two studio albums, Take Me To The Alley and Liquid Spirit, making it into the top 20 concurrently – a feat matched only by one other living artist, Adele.

“I think I have a voice of some emotion” he says, “That has the ability to touch people. My mother said that when I was young.

“The way jazz came to me, it was a very emotional music, and soulful, and thoughtful. In hearing jazz, I heard a gospel music, I heard even conversations of my grandmother and grandfather: the rhythm of how they lived their lives was in the music, so I was like ‘wow, this music is more than just lines and dots.’”

All emotion: Gregory Porter's voice has taken him from a difficult childhood to international success
Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Family seems finely threaded into his work. Porter’s mother raised him and his seven siblings singlehandedly, and pushed him constantly to pursue music, even from her deathbed. She went while he was still at university.

When he talks about her, he is fluent and bright eyed. “She’s in the lyric, she’s in my songs that I write.” He begins to recite some:

'My mother would take us out onto the streets and see who she could find who needed some type of help'

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‘Take me to the alley/Take me to the afflicted ones/Take me to the lonely ones that somehow lost their ways/Let them hear me say I am your friend/Come to my table, rest here in my garden/You will have a pardon.’

“That’s my mother, that’s how she was. She would take us out onto the streets and see who she could find who needed some type of help. At times as a child it could have been - it was - frustrating, because we were like: ‘Only focus on us! Only focus on us!’ and she was picking up a homeless alcoholic and putting him in the front seat of our car – and the day is filled with trying to get him some help.

“At the time, I couldn’t see the beauty and wisdom of it. Shortly thereafter, I saw: this is her calling, this is what she does and we’re a part of it. So that was part of our existence. If we had to give up some of our school clothes to some other kid who didn’t have… that’s just what happened. They’re very precious memories for me now.”

All about his words: Gregory Porter
Charlie Gates

Memories and stories make Porter’s music: he chats about his ideas and thoughts he’s working into shape, but doesn’t mention singing, except to explain what he’s singing about.

'In hearing jazz, I heard a gospel music, I heard even conversations of my grandmother and grandfather: the rhythm of how they lived their lives'

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“It’s not so important that everybody sees the dexterity and the brilliance of our musicality. Allow people to say that’s a given: ‘ok, they’re musicians, they know their way around the instrument…’ but allow them to get to the message. The ultimate thing is that the message is clear. There’s one with every note played.”

Who is his message for? We talk Starbucks soundtracks and second-rate crooners, and I ask if jazz has become too ‘white’. He pauses. “I do know” he says, and his voice drops a pitch, just for a moment.

“I do know that this was a music that was, in a way, more widely enjoyed by the black community.

“I am thinking about that person who doesn’t feel like – really, black or any other race – that feels like jazz doesn’t have anything to say to them. Somebody has to have a consciousness of civil rights and the thoughts of those things. The music, the structure of it… it was born in a place with a people that thought about those things when that wind came through the horns and when they sang. And Billie Holliday and Nat King Cole... Nat King Cole was so damn smooth for a reason, because he was a representative, in a way: he was the first Barack Obama.”

Late success: Porter didn't find fame until he was past 40

A big statement, but Porter is convincing, especially as he enthuses about the reach jazz has: “I am thinking of that young black 19-year-old who’s been stepped in hip-hop his whole life, who maybe doesn’t think jazz has anything for him.

“The funny thing is, when I lived in Bed-Stuy [Bedford-Stuyvesant, a deprived area of Brooklyn, where the likes of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, The Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z were raised], and Be Good was on the television, these hardcore hip-hop cats would tell me ‘Yeah, that tune be good, I like that man, that’s me.’ They could hear that vulnerability, there was a line in the lyric and they liked it.

Porter is a long way from Bed-Stuy now, travelling the world, married and with a three-year-old son: “He’s been to about 15 or 16 countries already, so his passport is quite full.

I’ve missed some moments in my son’s life already at three and a half. I’ll go through it, because I know this is to better our future, but it’s a difficult thing.

“I think the idea that I’m not sure that I’m doing the right thing is in Consequence of Love: ‘I begin to hate time and distance because it keeps me away from you’ – that specifically speaks to the people and the people that I love.”

Gregory Porter plays BBC Radio 2 Live In Hyde Park 'A Festival in a Day' on Sunday September 11, with Elton John.

His latest album, Take Me to the Alley, is out now.

Follow David Ellis on Twitter @dvh_ellis

Follow Going Out on Facebook and on Twitter @ESgoingout

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