Jazz breaking news: Gregory Porter in High Spirits

Championed in the UK by Jazzwise months before his first album Water was released here on Motéma Records in March 2011, Porter, who is based in Brooklyn NY, is the finest new jazz singer to have emerged in the past decade, and has deployed his huge bitter-sweet soulful baritone voice, exquisite, emotionally charged songwriting skills and uncanny power of intimate communication to most powerful effect, becoming a big international draw over the past 12 months.

Liquid Spirit is his major label debut after being signed by Universal Music following a bidding war with Blue Note in September 2012. However, in an uncanny twist of fate, the album is being released on Blue Note following Universal’s acquisition of the legendary jazz imprint’s owner, EMI, earlier this year, which will definitely put a smile on Mr Porter’s face. The album is produced by Brian Bacchus, who also produced its predecessor Be Good, released in March 2012, and features the singer’s core American band, including pianist and musical director Chip Crawford, alto sax firebrand Yosuke Sato, tenorist Tivon Pennicott, bassist Aaron James and drummer Emanuel Harrold, who have played on his previous albums, as well as guest trumpeter Curtis Taylor and organist Glenn Patscha. Liquid Spirit contains a generous 14 tracks, including three covers given the unique Porter touch: a deliciously cool latin-esque workover of the Ramsey Lewis/Dobie Gray mod floor-stepper, ‘The ‘In’ Crowd’; a swinging burn through Abbey Lincoln’s ‘Lonesome Lover’ and a tearfully poignant take on Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn’s ‘I Fall In Love Too Easily’, which floored the audience at Pizza Express Jazz Club last Autumn. The majority of tracks are brand new Porter songs, which in a number of cases, pick up on themes and characters from the earlier albums, as Porter outlined to me when I spoke to him in early May, weeks before his appearance at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival.

“If I can use a painting analogy again, (see ‘Painted On Canvas’ on Be Good) you put the paint on the canvas and you have to step back to see what it is. That’s what I do. I’ve said it before, it’s like I’m not calculating in terms of a sound or what it is I’m trying to achieve. I do it, then step back and see what it is” he told me as he took a moment or two out between European dates. “There are definitely some soul influences for sure on this next album, and some characters are reappearing that are in Water and Be Good. The theme of Water re-appears, a protest song of music and culture reappears. That character that is, if not ‘1960 What’, then is ‘On My Way To Harlem’. The character that is in ‘Illusions’ he re-appears trying to figure out his place in a love that’s maybe lost. The love and appreciation for my mother reappears. Over the course of six or seven albums maybe there is a suite of music that I will have written about certain themes. As this is my third album release to the public, the themes are less clear and discernible. What I am noticing with the music is, if I use this as a psychological test, I’m learning who I am as a person, a musician, a singer, a thinker every time that I write a song. Themes are re-occurring, people and characters are reappearing with something different to say, with the same intention or energy behind them. I’m excited about these new songs.”

On a fleeting first listen to an advance copy, which arrived barely an hour ago, listeners can expect the same superior standard of lyric writing, melodic expertise and a voice that just keeps getting better and better across a selection of sinewy groovers (‘Free’ and ‘Movin’), heart-tugging reflective jazz ballads (‘No Love Dying’, ‘Wolfcry’, ‘Water Under Bridges’ and ‘When Love Was King’), a forceful comment on today’s lowest common-denominator music scene on ‘Musical Genocide’ and another ‘1960 What’ style social-comment floor-stomper in the pounding title-track, ‘Liquid Spirit’.

No difficult third album dilemmas here then, or commercial major label sell-outs, just a Grade A, primo slab of Mr Porter, taking the best ideas, emotional moods and deep, deep spiritual soul-jazz of his previous two albums, then moving the whole damn deal up a notch or three. Make no mistake, this is seriously classy stuff indeed. And you know what buddy, it just might, after a few more listens, turn out to be his best yet.

– Jon Newey