A football lineman with a shoulder injury became a jazz baritone

Gregory Porter was born in Sacramento in 1971 and raised in Bakersfield, California, where his mother Ruth was a minister who encouraged him to sing in church. His father was largely absent. After finishing Highland High School in 1989 he received a full athletic scholarship as a football lineman at San Diego State University, but a shoulder injury in his junior year ended that career.

His mother died of cancer when he was 21. From her deathbed she told him to sing, and he took the instruction seriously. In 2004 Porter moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn with his brother Lloyd, and worked as a chef at Lloyd's restaurant, Bread-Stuy, where he also performed. He then played neighborhood venues including Sista's Place and Solomon's Porch and kept a weekly residency at the Harlem club St. Nick's Pub, out of which his touring band grew.

Two albums on the Motéma label, Water in 2010 and Be Good in 2012, came before he signed with Blue Note Records in May 2013. His third album, Liquid Spirit, won the 2014 Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album and reached the UK top 10, rare for a jazz record, and was certified gold by the BPI. His fourth, Take Me to the Alley, followed in May 2016 and won the same Grammy in 2017.

Public stages came next. In 2015 he sang “As Time Goes By” at the televised VE Day 70 concert in London, and in June 2016 he played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. The Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick described a creamy baritone that flows thick and smooth, and added that Porter may be the oddest pop star on the planet. That voice is also what lets a song like “No Love Dying” land with such quiet force.