![]() I don’t want to miss … you know what I mean? “ Our Love,” I wrote while walking around the Tower of London. I’ve even had somebody turn their camera on and just tape me for 15 seconds, and then have them send it to my email. All these things come out in my writing.ĭo you write on your laptop, iPad - or old-school pen and paper?Īll of those. I started dealing with my relationships, I started dealing with what I feel about love, and the country and … things I feel about … race, mutual respect and justice. I realized that when writing from a personal experience, writing about grounded soulful things, I was most effective at communicating in song. I wanted to make music that struck me the way listening to Nat Cole’s music or Sammy Davis Jr.’s music struck me. How did you get into in the storytelling aspect of your songwriting? A more grounded, rooted sound that I was bringing into my jazz. At the moment I started to utilize that in my singing was when success started to happen. When it came time to do my jazz, the one thing that set me apart was I had this country, gospel, blues background. So I was probably getting something from … music from the turn of the century or the ’20s, stylistically. I was singing with a lot of older singers, 80-year-old singers, when I was a little kid. Some of those roots came to central California that I was exposed to in church. My mother was from Shreveport, Louisiana, and my father from Memphis, Tennessee. That gospel migration that came from the South. Also, you find a way to stick out with eight kids and it was just my thing. It always just felt like the right thing, my thing. ![]() So there was a lot of music in the house. There were eight kids - we were basically a choir. I think my mother saw the positive side of my injury before I did … said, ‘Now you have more flexibility to explore music, focus on your studies, and see what happens’ … I think I ended up in the right place.” “I remember standing in my apartment in San Diego, boo-hooing,” he said in 2016. She died of cancer when Porter was just 21. Raising her children in the church and instilling in them those Christian and gospel roots, Porter’s mother remains an inspirational source in his life. Porter, along with his seven siblings, was raised by his minister mother, Ruth, while his father, Rufus, a Memphis, Tennessee, native, was not there for them. This is mixed with the soulful lyrics that greet you with a dose of realism and the careful arrangements of Donny Hathaway. His voice has the rasp of Sam Cooke, but also the liquid butter sound of his favorite artist Nat “King” Cole. He was awarded his first Grammy for 2012’s Liquid Spirit, and earned his latest Grammy for his 2016 Take Me To The Alley in the best jazz vocal album category. Porter’s baritone voice and mindful songwriting have placed him in the highest of ranks. “So when I started to exorcise this pain in my heart … it came out as melody and lyric about him, and our relationship.” Four albums and two Grammys later, his velvety voice remains a funky fusion of jazz, blues, soul and gospel.įrom those tiny club stages, Porter began a journey to become a male African-American jazz singer - whom BBC calls a “ worryingly rare breed.” Porter signed with the Motema label and released Water in 2010. After moving from Bakersfield, California, to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York, to work as a chef at his brother’s restaurant, he began to moonlight as a crooner in the clubs, cafes and restaurants of Brooklyn and Harlem, New York. But shortly after his January 1990 enrollment, he suffered a career-ending rotator cuff injury. Porter - 6-feet-5 and 255 pounds - earned a San Diego State athletic scholarship in football as a lineman. This is not a game - or an insurance commercial: Damian Lillard’s album is excellent.There’s more to Nina Simone than just ‘Strange Fruit’.Chuck Berry has died - and so has rock ’n’ roll.Frank Ocean’s ‘Chanel’ is the most important song in the world right now.Russell Westbrook, LeBron James, Kendrick Lamar and Drake: the blurred lines between basketball and rap. ![]() ![]() I had a pain in my chest about him not showing enough interest in my life as a child.” Editor's picks “I came to writing my own music not because of some love story or from some broken heart,” said jazz singer Gregory Porter.
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