Life hasn’t always been easy for Gregory Porter, but, as the velvet-voiced superstar tells Emma Higginbotham, nothing beats the healing power of music.
What do you remember about being eight years old? For Gregory Porter, an abiding memory is fearing for his life.
“I remember being chased with a knife by this guy,” says the jazz singer softly. “He stuck the knife out of the car, and he’s driving alongside of me, calling me names. Now he had to be 20-something, and I’m just a kid. And I was cute! I had fat cheeks and curly hair! But the sickness of racism is that skin colour causes a person to think ‘This is what I should do’.”
It wasn’t the first or last time that Porter and his family, who lived in a predominantly white area of Bakersfield, California, faced racial abuse. His brother Brian was even shot in a racist attack, thankfully not fatally.
“We found ourselves in this pocket of real heat,” recalls the 48-year-old. “We had cross-burning, they would urinate in beer bottles and throw them through our windows, and countless times being called names. But my mother was so strong. She just stayed in our face and told us that we were below nobody. So when I sing about it, it’s from a real place.”
The double Grammy award-winner explores all this on his sixth studio album, All Rise, but without anger. Featuring his trademark blend of jazz, gospel and soul, the overriding theme is love – and even when the message is more serious, it’s given a positive spin.
Take the song Mr Holland, where he thanks the white father of his love interest for not making an issue of his black skin. This, he reveals, is the opposite of what really happened.
“The truth is that somebody said ‘Get away from my door’,” he says, and spells out the N-word. “I was just a teenager and I wanted to have a soda with a girl, nothing more, and that’s what he said. I can’t react to him now, but I can write a song about it, so this is like ‘cleansing’ the real experience. Hopefully it buys me a luxury car, and I say to him ‘Thank you for buying me that luxury car!’”
Weekend is chatting to Porter (before the current restrictions) in a swishy, retro-style café in central London. A chunky 6ft 4, he looks imposingly huge as he pours tea from a dainty pot. Yet when he speaks, much as when he sings, it’s like a lullaby for grown-ups.
Dozens of column inches have been devoted to describing his voice – ‘liquid honey’, ‘creamy’, ‘treacle-soft’ – and he’s heard them all before.
“They’re all like something that you’d want on your dessert,” he says with a deep laugh. “Or ‘coffee with butter mixed in’. It’s a thing now, putting butter in coffee. Have you heard of this? It sounds disgusting.” Even the word ‘disgusting’ sounds delicious when he says it.
“Not to be narcissistic, but I use my voice to soothe myself and other people,” he continues. “My mother said I would sing my discontented self to sleep as a little boy, and I use it to put other people at ease. I’ve been big since I was 12, and sometimes when I’m walking in dark alleyways, I sing Nature Boy,” he says, referring to the Nat King Cole classic. “Somebody who’s going to attack you is not going to sing Nature Boy.”
Nat King Cole has been a hero-figure to Porter since he was tiny. The second youngest of eight children battling for attention from their mother, Ruth, a hard-working preacher who brought up her brood alone, he would endlessly sing along to her Nat King Cole records – and she loved to listen. The jazz vocalist, he confides, felt like a substitute for his absent father: “He left when she was pregnant with me, so I was never in the house with him.”
Although his mum adored his singing, his siblings weren’t so enthusiastic. “They told me to shut up all the time! I’d be singing along to everything on the radio, and every song that came on TV: the intros to sitcoms, bleach commercials... So that’s probably annoying,” he concedes.
Even so, a career in music wasn’t the plan. His impressive height was matched by his speed, and teenage Porter was an outstanding American football player, winning a full scholarship to San Diego State University. Sporting stardom beckoned, but it wasn’t to be; a nasty shoulder injury saw him hanging up his padding for good.
His early 20s were tough. In a perfect storm of sadness – the end of his sports dream, the death of his mother from breast cancer and the break-up of a serious relationship – Porter took solace in the only way he knew.
“Music is a healing thing for me,” he says. “The songs came. Everything happens for a reason, and this is the way I deal with my pain. I write about it.”
Success by no means happened overnight. He first became an actor, performing in both straight plays and musicals, then ran his own catering company and helped out at his brother Lloyd’s New York restaurant.
By day he cooked, by night he sang in clubs, and occasionally the two collided. One day he was catering for a party ahead of an important gig that evening. “The party got bigger, so they requested more food, and I ended up going to the gig in my chefs’ whites. So I’m singing with the band in chefs’ whites, with butternut squash all over me. The pictures must be insane.”
At the unlikely age of almost 40, he finally found the limelight with his debut album Water, winning himself not only a Grammy nomination but a reputation for bringing jazz back to the masses. Since then he’s gained global acclaim, yet in spite of his success, the one thing everybody wants to know about is the headgear he always wears: an oversized black cap with tight-fitting straps that enclose his ears and chin.
Is he sick of people asking about it? Porter laughs. “They say ‘What’s the medical condition? What’s the religious reason?’ There is no religious reason, and there is no real medical reason. It’s just my thing. I feel comfy.”
But he must have put it on for a reason in first place? “Yeah,” he grins. Is he not willing to share? He leans forward. ‘I’ll tell you: if it was burns, if it was scars, if it was some infirmity, then it would only give me empathy for people who are suffering with anything. It would give me empathy for people who feel insecure about something physical, whether it be an eye, or a scar, or a skin colour. So there you go. Whatever it is.” So it is something? “I didn’t say that! You said that!”
The hints are there. Yet whatever bleak times he’s had, Porter’s sunny nature continues to seep into his lyrics and music, and it’s no surprise when he describes himself as someone with a big heart.
“There are people who say ‘Man, you need to darken up a little bit, Leonard Cohen up a little bit’, and that exists in me, but singing it 250 time a year? I’m not interested in that. I want to uplift,” he says, and laughs again.
“The thing I’m most proud of is not that I’ve sold a lot of records, it’s that I’ve done it saying the things that I want to say. Generally it’s about love, and I’m happy about that.”
All Rise by Gregory Porter is released in August 2020
Gregory Porter and his Russian wife, Victoria, have a 7-year-old son, Demyan. ‘He has a sweet voice, and he loves to sing. When he was four or five, he travelled with me on tour in the UK, and I’d come into my dressing room and I had orange juice and cakes, and he was like ‘This is for me too, because I’m a singer too, not just you!’”
The new album includes Dad Gone Thing, a song about his absent father, Rufus, who he only met a handful of times. “I went to his funeral and learned all these wonderful things about him. He had a great voice, he was a poet, a wordsmith and a charismatic guy. I went through my life thinking that he gave me nothing, but really, the very reason we’re doing this interview is because of my voice and the way I write. Maybe if that’s transferred by way of DNA, he’s given me quite a bit.”
Before finding fame, Porter was in the Tony award-winning Broadway cast of It Ain't Nothin' But the Blues in 1999, and staged his own musical, Nat King Cole & Me, in 2004. Since then he has graced the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, performed for the Queen and became the first celebrity to sing a lullaby on CBeebies’ Bedtime Stories.
An edited version of this story was published in Waitrose Weekend in April 2020 (c) Waitrose