The Catalyst interview: Gregory Porter

The youngest of Ruth Porter’s seven children, Gregory Porter grew up singing in the church. His mother was an ordained minister, and the children would often appear with her, in storefront churches in and around Bakersfield, California, leading the congregation in gospel songs.

He was around 8 years old, Porter reckons, when he told his mother he wanted something more. “I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a gospel singer. I just said wanted to sing about love.

“And she was like ‘God made love, son. It’s OK to sing about it.’”

Gregory Porter, who’ll appear in concert Friday at the Floridian Social Club, is an acclaimed jazz singer whose rich, velvety baritone has drawn comparisons to great vocalists of the past from Donny Hathaway and Bill Withers to Nat “King” Cole. Truth be told, they were among his earliest musical heroes.

Ruth Porter was especially fond to his interpretations of Cole’s popular ballads. “I remember her asking me to sing ‘Nature Boy’ in church one time,” Porter tells the Catalyst. “It’s a secular song, with spiritual overtones, really not about Christ but another spiritual person. She liked that, I remember, and she liked that type of song in particular.”

Gifted with a warm tonality and an expressive delivery, Porter has three gold albums, one platinum album and two Grammy Awards.

More than a jazz vocalist in the simplest definition, he is soulful and direct. It all goes back, Porter insists, to the family home. In the 1970s, his older brothers were always bringing records into the house – he gravitated towards Hathaway, and Cole, and jazz great Louis Armstrong.

“But my oldest brothers were into the cotemporary ‘70s stuff – Parliament/Funkadelic, Stevie Wonder. And the radio stations in Los Angeles at the time – this is before we moved to Bakersfield – were literally everything. Jazz was played right after Stevie Wonder. Right after the Temptations. There wasn’t this corporate separation of the music, as it is now.

“Because my mother was a minister, all the time the music wasn’t welcome in the house. Everything. She definitely didn’t want to hear Mtume’s ‘Juicy Fruit.’ We played music when she was out of the house a lot. So the influence was everything, from the things I was supposed to get – Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland, Mississippi Mass Choir, to the things I wasn’t supposed to get, like Parliament.”

She enjoyed (or tolerated) almost all of it, Porter explains, “but at the point where she heard a crazy lyric, she would turn everything off and make us come in the living room and have a family prayer meeting. That’s the way it went down if it ever went over the line … so we always kept it just under the line.”

On her deathbed, Ruth Porter encouraged her son to keep singing.

And so he fashioned a style seamlessly blending elements of jazz, soul (rhythm ‘n’ blues) and gospel. “I call it the diaspora of music,” he explains. “To synthesize it all, it’s really the Black American musical experience.

“But I’m approaching all of it as a jazz singer, though. And I could say the same thing: I’m approaching all of it as a gospel singer. I just don’t draw any distinctions, stylistically, in the devices that I use. Something that needs to be delivered in a soulful, powerful way, the gospel sound comes out. When there’s a refinement of the lyric, when there’s a poetry that suggests a classic jazz delivery, then that’s the voice that I use.

“It’s the appropriate sound for the appropriate moment. Every instrumentalist has the ability to do that. And I just do it with my voice.”

Porter has an enormous following in Great Britain; he’s sold out London’s prestigious Royal Albert Hall on four separate occasions.

Porter thinks he knows why. “They hear the soul influences in my voice,” he says. “They love soul music in the U.K. And the audience said ‘This is what we want.’ It’s probably the most organic coming-to-fame in a way. The record company didn’t push it; the audience demanded it.”

Porter believes they have “bigger ears” in England and aren’t so fixated on “’what’s the hottest’ and ‘what are the 14-year-olds listening to?’” The way the Americans seem to be.

He’s a star there on the level of Ed Sheeran or Harry Styles. “My dressing room is right next to theirs,” he chuckles. “I have the same champagne as they do.”

His English fans, he believes, “haven’t delegated me to a soul, or jazz, or R&B or whatever you want to call me. They haven’t isolated me to that ghetto, if you’ll allow that word. They’re like ‘That’s cool music, and you belong where everybody else is.’”

He paid tribute to his biggest influence on 2017’s gold album Nat “King” Cole & Me. And last year’s Still Rising – The Collection included studio duets with, among others, the late Ella Fitzgerald, Julie London – and Cole himself.

These were done, of course, via studio trickery.

“I was figuring out jazz, figuring out the American Songbook through their records,” says Porter. “So these were dream-come-true moments. For them to be sanctioned by the record companies or by the families is even more extraordinary.”

He performed “Mona Lisa” with Cole’s existing master vocal take, in the legendary Capitol Records recording studio at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. He was allowed to use Cole’s actual microphone for the recording.

“I remembered driving past that building as a kid,” Porter says. “I don’t even talk about how powerful it is, because it is just deeper than deep.”

Tickets for Friday’s concert are available here.