Gregory Porter: ‘I remember my brothers protesting – eating after the bums! My mother was showing us how to live’

Before they switched off the ventilator, Gregory Porter sang to his brother. It was the summer of 2020, and Lloyd Porter was one of thousands rushed to A&E as the first wave of Covid struck New York. After several weeks in hospital, his condition deteriorated sharply. Over a video link, Gregory blinked away the tears and crooned. Lloyd didn’t respond. Gregory hopes the words got through. He has his doubts.

“I sang to him,” the Grammy-nominated jazz singer says. “But at the opportunity that I sang to him, I said, ‘He’s gone.’ I don’t know if he’s clinically dead. In the middle of my song I was, like, ‘He’s not there.’ He was intubated. He was in that early [wave] that came through New York. They were super careful. They were burning the bodies or freezing them. He disappeared. He went in, intubated that day – and he just disappeared.”

Porter is surprisingly forthcoming for someone getting by on less than four hours of sleep. He was in Amsterdam the previous night, at a concert by Corinne Bailey Rae, and took a red-eye to Ireland. He’s here to promote his new album, Christmas Wish. As the title indicates, it’s a selection of seasonal favourites – to which Porter adds several original compositions.

Christmas albums are everywhere, but this one is different. Porter explains that the project is more than a Christmas record. It is a meditation on family, love and loss: the joy of togetherness, the sadness of separation, the distant ache when you notice that empty chair at the dinner table.

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The melancholy side of Christmas is something of which Porter is painfully familiar, having lost his brother to Covid and his sister Patrice to breast cancer in the same year. The new LP is also a valentine to his late mother, “Miss Ruth”, who raised eight children single-handedly; she died at the beginning of Porter’s career.

He gives thanks to the lessons she taught about generosity and humility on Christmas Wish’s title track, a plaintive piece inspired by an incident in which she gave away the family’s seasonal dinner to the underprivileged in their neighbourhood in Bakersfield, California.

“The real story is not a made-up one. It’s about my mother putting all this food on the table. We prayed over it. Then we took and gave the food away to homeless people,” he says. “And then we ate the leftovers. I remember my brothers protesting – eating after the bums! Now, for all of us, it’s a precious memory she was teaching, giving us a foundation of how to live our lives. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. It was just a dinner – but it was so dope, on Christmas Day, to feed people. And eat after them.”

He had more recent memories in mind covering Vince Guaraldi and Lee Mendelson’s Christmas Time Is Here. The song was written in 1965 for A Charlie Brown Christmas and was a favourite of Porter’s late brother. He explains that for the project to resonate he had to feel a connection with the material.

I’m still in my mind this little guy from Bakersfield. Is my gift worthy? And it is. And other little boys think, Is my gift worthy? And it is

“Christmas Time Is Here is on the record because it’s my brother’s favourite song. Cradle in Bethlehem because I’m a mama’s boy and I love lullabies – and it happens to be my favourite Christmas song.”

He puts a personal gloss even on familiar material such as Little Drummer Boy, which has been covered by everyone from David Bowie and Bing Crosby to the Minnesota “slow-core” trio Low.

“It has these lyrics and this thought – is my gift worthy of a king? I’ve sung for all royalty around the world,” Porter says. He hopes that other young people from challenging backgrounds will look to his success as an example. “I’m still in my mind this little guy from Bakersfield. Is my gift worthy? And it is. And other little boys think, Is my gift worthy? And it is.”

[ Gregory Porter: the cat with a hatful of soul ]

Porter still lives in Bakersfield with his Russian wife, Victoria, and their sons, Demyan and Lev. California conjures many images, none of which quite chimes with Bakersfield, which has had issues with racism and became an epicentre for the Black Lives Matter protests, in which Porter was proud to participate. More than an epicentre: in June 2020 a black protester was killed when a car rammed into a march.

“It’s a Southern transplantation – people from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas,” Porter says of the town, which is about 175km north of Los Angeles. “Agriculture and oil are king there. Some of those old Southern ideas came with the people. It was long to die there, these ideas of race. My mother brought us up in Bakersfield: she picked cotton there when she was a girl. She had moved from Shreveport, Louisiana, to California.”

The 2020 protest originated in Minnesota, where George Floyd was killed. But California, which has its own legacy of racism, including the police beating of Rodney King in 1991, quickly became an epicentre for communities saying enough was enough.

“In California it was really something. The interesting thing about my home town is how diverse the crowd was. It was a lot of Latinos – Bakersfield is quite Latino now. Mixed in with the Latinos were black people. I was, like, ‘Wow, it’s interesting.’ That time was interesting in that we were trying to make a change. Maybe this is a changing moment, a time of conversation,” he says.

I remember her oxygen machine being all the way up on 10 and she still wasn’t getting enough air

Extremists on the American right criticised BLM as “black supremacy”. Nothing could be further from the truth, Porter says.

“Nobody was trying to get a step above. ‘Now I can put my foot on your neck’ – no. People characterised it in a whole bunch of ways: ‘Oh, this was just reverse racism.’ Don’t let me be the one to speak of some of the rights and wrongs that happened. Ultimately what people wanted was fairness. Bakersfield was part of that. There was a man killed by a protest – a guy drove through and killed a man that was protesting.”

Porter had it tough growing up. His father walked out on the family early on, leaving his mother, a Baptist minister, to bring up the children. People always told Porter he could sing. But he lacked self-belief. He suffered, he feels, from a tendency to apologise too much for himself.

In his teens it looked as if sport might be his ticket out of Bakersfield. He won a scholarship as an American football lineman to San Diego State University only to receive a career-ending shoulder injury. He also acquired scars on his cheeks at some point, hence his signature modified hat with a strap running under his chin.

He was a little adrift when his mother died. He was 21. On her deathbed, she pleaded with him to follow his passion for music. He remembered her words through all the success that followed: five Grammy nominations and concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Royal Albert Hall.

“She said to me… two days before she passed, she said, ‘Gregory, music is the best thing you do. Don’t forget about your music. We talked about kids, buying a house…”

He trails off, the recollections still vivid.

“I remember her oxygen machine being all the way up on 10 and she still wasn’t getting enough air. She said, ‘Turn it up.’ And I twisted the knob, even though the knob didn’t move. She said, ‘Ah, that’s better.’ It was already up on maximum. She knew her time wasn’t long.”

He is looking forward to Christmas. But it will be bittersweet. His wife’s parents are back in Russia, and she can’t fly out to see them. There are also tensions within the family over the Ukraine invasion and Vladimir Putin.

“They used to go every summer. I’ve had many trips to Russia. Since the war there’s been no travel. I don’t think we’ve been in three or four years. It’s even difficult to communicate now. They know we feel a certain way. And they are steeped in the propaganda of the situation. There have been difficult conversations.

“My wife was always, like, ‘My mother is so apolitical.’ We thought that was a bad thing. It has actually been a godsend. They can talk about, ‘What kind of socks have you got for the grandbaby?’ Just general stuff. It’s not heightened. I appreciate that about her, on a personal level.

“At the same time it’s a difficult, difficult situation. It has affected relationships within the family. I have a two-year-old – the grandparents haven’t seen the baby. And I don’t know when they will.”

For now, he’s looking forward to having friends and family around on December 25th.

“Even if people say they’re not coming, they’re coming. I do a couple of roasts, two or three turkeys, and many different salads. Just when I think it’s 16, 17 people – it’s 60, 80 people. And they all eat. ‘You can go to Gregory’s house: there’s some good food there’. I like that.”

Christmas Wish is released via Blue Note/Decca Records