You Need Greg Porter in Your Life

A week and some days later folks in the Triangle are still smiling about
their outing with Greg Porter. Porters second trip to Durham left local
fans and the newly initiated with rich and swinging memories that will
take them smiling into the chilly months ahead.
This was one of those concerts where the artists set list coincided with
my wish list. He did everything I wanted to hear, supplemented by a
few surprises out of his expanding catalog.
It is hard to imagine that anyone familiar with his sweet and booming
baritone is unaware of how conscious his music is. Sometimes subtle
and at others straight up political, his music is the perfect combination
of social/political commentary and luscious melodic lines with
sophisticated and slick rhythmic phrasing.
Opening the set with Donny Hathaways classic Someday Well All Be
Free wasnt simply a nod to the great singer and songwriter but a
reflection of the historical moment, the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Later in the set his inspired rendition of 1960 What? offered a
straight line from the rebellions in Watts, Detroit and Newark to
Ferguson and Baltimore.
My favorite, On My Way to Harlem, easily an anti-gentrification, Black
displacement anthem, was served up in a way that transported the
audience to the once Black Mecca. Unlike the recording and previous
performances, his fade out at the end had soft references to Marvin
Gaye instead of Hey, there goes that A Train a tribute to the
Ellington classic (The Duke is lifted up in the song lyrics) and the
subway line so famous for getting folks to 125th street on up to 155th
Street. For old school Black Brooklynites, the A Train was the route
from Bedford-Stuyvesant (another site of rampant gentrifying) to
Harlem.
The gripping bass line and piano vamp on Musical Genocide served
as an underpinning for a forceful defense of some of the Black musical
genres of the mid twentieth century-Blues, Gospel, and Soul. I do not
agree, this not for me he declares and then goes out, which is absent
from the recording, roll calling Nat King Cole, Sam Cook, Mahalia
Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross.
As someone who looks for lineage I end up finding him coming from
Billy Eckstine and Joe Williams in terms of his mesmerizing timbre and
range. Of course Porter and others may think differently. His lyrical
commentary is in the tradition of Chicagos Oscar Brown Jr. who would
have popped his fingers to Porters version of Work Song having

written the lyrics to the Nat Adderly original. Here you had to think
mass incarceration as he inveighs about doing time and the impact on
his woman which translates into the impact on families in the New
Jim Crow Era.
The newly renovated Page auditorium reverberated with the sounds of
Porters explosive quartet. Rather than a standard trio backing him, he
surrounded himself with Chip Crawford an NCCU alum on piano,
another NCCU alum Jahmal Nichols
on bass, Emauel Harrold on
drums and Yohsuke Satoh on alto sax and flute. This band. Nichols and
Harrold kept things in the pocket with Crawford as the glue. Chip brings
it every time he sits at the piano and brought out the hometown fan
club, which is a huge posse. He drove and cajoled the unit all night
giving us gorgeous melodic explorations on the one hand and
pyrotechnics with thunderous runs on the other. At the end of a duet
on Wolfcry, he and Porter took us to church with Porter seemingly
channeling the spirit and sounds of his mothers church and Crawford
calling on some pianist he had heard at First Baptist in Raleigh or St.
Josephs AME in Durham. It was, well, righteous.
And then there is Satoh. He has chops galore and aint afraid to show
it. He hasnt met a sixteenth note that he doesnt like and approaches
each solo as if he only had two or three bars rather than a chorus or
two. Theres no build up in his solos; straight fire from the first note.
Not a practitioner of less is more; every beat is filled with as many
notes as he can fit in. This intensity worked oh so well during his solo
on 1960 What?as his blistering solo brought you the heat from the
fires and the Black rage at the destruction of Black bodies by the
police.
The set was rounded out with outstanding interpretations of the
ballads No Love Dying, Hey Laura, and Skylark. We brought him
back for an encore and he gave us Real Good Hands.
The tune Hey Laura has a line that says Hey Laura its me. Sorry to
ring your doorbell so late. But theres something bothering me. On the
way to the parking lot I asked my grandson what did he think about the
concert and he smiled and said I thought Laura was going to come
out. Indeed.
Ajamu Dakarai Dillahunt
October 3, 2015