Gregory Porter interview: 'The protest music of jazz is still there'

Wired for sound: Gregory Porter asks what makes artists tick on podcast The Hang
Matt Writtle

There’s more to life than image, says Gregory Porter, a hulking, 6ft 4in jazz titan whose pastel shorts nicely offset the balaclava he always wears to mask childhood facial scars. “People can be like: what sexy drink do you like? What you got on? What’s slick? What’s cool? What’s edgy?” he adds, his gorgeous, Grammy-winning baritone rolling his barrel chest like the tide. “Yes, that’s cool, but that’s just the sideproduct. I want to get into the root of people.”

It really is a very nice voice, ASMR for the soul. It’s a good thing, then, that he has a new podcast, The Hang, in which he “gets into” what makes artists tick, from Jeff Goldblum to Kamasi Washington, gently shooting the breeze. He’s just come back from recording an episode at Annie Lennox’s house on a mountaintop in Mallorca, which sounds dreamy. They talked for six hours about “politics, love and music”, and the warring mountain goats and pigs that live in the shrubland nearby, before she sang Sweet Dreams and his own hit, Hey Laura.

And then the airport lost his luggage. “I lose my bags all the time,” he says, unfazed. “Sometimes for two months. One of the worst times was when I had come from France and I had packed cheese, because I was really crazy about camembert, so I have this really nice suit that stinks of camembert, no matter how many times I dry clean it.” How does he clean it? “When it starts to rain and storm and the wind is blowing, I hang it out under a pine tree, and I think, this will be fresh as Norway, and yet it still smells like the funkiest French cheese seller. Because it was pressed up in the breast of the jacket for two months.”

Porter, 47, loves to let a conversation unspool. He finds interviewers “like a psychoanalyst, a therapist in many ways”, which led him to pick up podcasting. “The deepest question I was ever asked is, ‘Where did you get your singing voice?’ I had never considered it, but my father was a singer, which I only learned at his funeral. And to that point I’d said to myself in my mind, ‘He gave me nothing, he left me nothing physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. He had no connection to me.’ But yet the very thing that has ascended me to higher heights and is allowing me to travel all over the world is the singing voice: that he gave me.”

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Porter grew up in southern and central California, a “momma’s boy” and one of nine children. His late mother, a nurse, “was angelic”, he says. “We watched her do things for strangers that most people reserve for their closest loved ones. She’d go to someone having a panic attack and put a cold towel on her head.” He remembers “her physically picking up a homeless man, who had urinated on himself, his false teeth laying on the ground and dirty, and putting him in our car to come home with us for two weeks until she’d talked him better.”

That moral fortitude is the “bedrock” of Porter’s blues and soul; the Liquid Spirit that made him a household name. His mother always told him he had a voice like Nat King Cole, but it’s a long way from Bakersfield in Sixties California to Annie Lennox’s hilltop chateau. “Our neighbours tried to run us out,” he says (they were one of a few black families in a mainly white neighbourhood). “It was the more overt type of racism — the cross burned on the lawn, the watermelons and bottles of urine thrown through the window. They tried to cut down a 30ft tree so it would fall on our house. They got half way through before my brother chased them off.”

Music is how he vents. “Music that speaks of politics is less listened to than the music of partying, but it’s still there. The blues, and the protest music of jazz,” and hip-hop too. He continues: “There were some things in my childhood I thought we’d put to sleep. The idea of one race’s supremacy over another. I thought the issue of colour would be put to sleep by the time I had a son. And that’s maybe why I had a kid so late.” His son is six but has already experienced discrimination. “He had a really good friend and he was like, what happened to her? She was just a little girl who liked him, and the father just didn’t like it. It was a race thing.”

Still, he remains “very trusting” and tells security to let fans come up to him — not always wise. “At Cheltenham Jazz Festival I thought I could handle three well-aled women grabbing me around the neck but I was like, here comes the mud, we going down.” He says he’s lucky. Porter did not even get started as a recording artist until hitting 40, when his 2010 debut caught the attention of jazz heads. His 2013 major-label album Liquid Spirit won a Grammy and was a UK crossover hit.

There’s a lot of hurt to sing about, he says. “You’d think we’d be exhausted by that rhetoric but you’re still able to move people with fear and fright and lies that somebody’s going to take your place, that in order for someone to rise, you have to fall. It’s such a cheap mechanism, cheap way to deal. It’s as easy as throwing a spider or a cockroach on someone.” It’s a terrible world. But he makes beautiful music from it.

Gregory Porter’s weekly podcast The Hang starts on August 8 and is available on all podcast platforms

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