Review: Gregory Porter joins the ranks of Jazz Festival legends

Gregory Porter and his all-star band of musicians brought his sweet sounds to the opening night of the Cork Guinness Jazz Festival with a 90-minute set at the Opera House.

Porter hit all the right notes and the California-born Grammy winner was inviting us to join his band as he sang his encore.

When the great man came on stage he said that the evening would be about love.

His mission, he said, was to have us leave enveloped in a warm fuzzy feeling, and a little “angry, because I didn’t sing enough songs”, he said.

He’s a real charmer, without ever coming across as phony. I felt grace and an easy, good-natured humour. “Word on the street is you can sing,” he said, and so we sang with him, when asked. After all, as he said, “you people paid to come hear me sing, not you”.

This was my first proper jazz festival gig. When I was in college, I went to bars and pubs and heard jazz, but had never been to a concert.

One song seemed to melt into the next, but Porter would take the time to tell a story behind the song. For instance, ‘Take Me To The Alley’ brought him back to when he was six or seven and he would sing to people who had lost their way, and his mother would turn the speakers out on to the alley. ‘On My Way To Harlem’ is about the small jazz club where he would jam. Telling the story behind the song is a characteristic Irish thing (and there is a link in that jazz is supposed to be a derivation of the Irish word for heat: Teas), which transferred over with generations of Irish immigrants to the US.

‘Musical Genocide’ didn’t need any great explanation.

“I do not agree, this is not for me, no musical genocide,” and you knew right away what his target was even, though he did not speak its name out loud.

The final number was ‘Join My Band’, and we were all singing, we were all joining his band, though it would be a tight fit for all of us in that Harlem club.

With that performance, Gregory Porter has joined the ranks of the real Guinness Cork Jazz Festival legends.