Unwrapping Gregory Porter's Christmas Wish
Unwrapping Gregory Porter's Christmas Wish
A review of the singer's first full-length seasonal album
Welcome music lovers to another edition of ‘Listening Sessions’!
It’s become a tradition here that come December, this space is dedicated to exploring the sounds of the holiday season (for those not inclined to Christmas music, not to worry, regular programming will resume here in January).
Singer Gregory Porter is one of the finest voices of his generation and in November, he released his first full-length holiday album, Christmas Wish. It is a record crafted with care and redolent of the way that pop records used to be made. While I wasn’t entirely knocked by it, there are enough wonderful moments on it to write enthusiastically about and it’s always nice to hear something new in the seasonal canon that prioritizes sincerity over cynicism. I hope you will enjoy the essay and will share your thoughts by dropping a comment.
I will be next in touch—the last time this year—in two weeks’ time (December 22) as opposed to the usual 10 days—with a meditation on the Christmas repertoire, focusing on two albums: Ella Fitzgerald’s Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas and Connie Francis’ Christmas in My Heart.
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
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In a promotional video attached to soprano Renée Fleming’s Christmas in New York, released in 2014, she asks Gregory Porter, who guests on the recording, what Yuletide in the city means to him. Porter answers by describing an alleyway approaching Rockefeller Center where he would sit for a while each holiday season and people watch as the masses flocked by to see the mighty tree holding court above the Prometheus sculpture and the Center’s famed skating rink.
The rinks of New York—Manhattan specifically—are fascinating stages of the breadth of human endeavour underlining the act of skating. There are the graceful gliders—head out, arms loosely behind the back, hair blown back most pleasantly. There are the more gangly—body hunched forward, hands stuck out at the sides, ever recalibrating slightly up or down to keep a temporary hold on equilibrium. There are those who travel in groups—couples, hands held tightly or simply staying close together with hands left loose; friends moving in packs, maintaining an ongoing conversation as they lap around the rink over and over again. There are those whose skating is an artform, dropping in a figure-skating move or two, casually crisscrossing the rink as if making a never ending paint stroke over the icy canvas. And then there are those who skate as a matter of survival, clinging for dear life to any ledge or anchor point that is the only chance of staying upright and avoiding finding oneself suddenly supine on the hard, unforgiving surface. Plant your seat at a rink and you will see it all.
Porter is a warm observer of what is happening around him. He came to New York in 2004 from California, where has was born and raised and has since returned to make it his home base. Residing in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he performed in local haunts before he began to hold court weekly at St. Nick’s Pub in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. To think of Sugar Hill is to think of that timeless direction that “you must take the A train to get to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem,” part of the lyrics that singer Joya Sherrill added to Billy Strayhorn’s immortal line that became Duke Ellington’s calling card.
Sugar Hill, which runs ten city blocks from West 145th to West 155th between Edgecombe and Amsterdam, was a tony district in Harlem during its Renaissance and where Ellington himself resided. The feeling of his presence—he would often remind that in Harlem, there were more churches than cabarets—is an emotional centrepoint of one of Porter’s most memorable compositions, ‘On My Way to Harlem.’
Summoning the ghosts in the air among of brownstones, Porter ruminates on three: Ellington, Langston Hughes and Marvin Gaye. They have all left Harlem corporeally but as Porter sings: “I can hear their echoes still.” Affirming his rightful place in a district bursting with history and excellence, Porter’s song is both in and out of time. The rhythm is a bright jazz shuffle. The melody rises throughout the verse, providing a sense of uplift that recalls Donny Hathaway. Anchoring it all is Porter’s voice: an instrument of warm generosity. Instantly identifiable are the lineages that connect Porter to the through line of jazz and soul: Hathaway, Nat Cole and Bill Withers.
Cole’s influence is so encompassing that Porter recorded a full-length tribute to him in 2017, the triumphant Nat “King” Cole & Me. Withers is never far when Porter has his feet planted firmly on the ground. There’s the step beat of ‘Real Good Hands,’ a celebration of being an able and caring partner, and the ruminative ‘Day Dream’ with that understated Withers feel that can sneak up on you.
As Porter has moved from the independent Motéme label, on which he released his debut, Water and his follow-up, Be Good to the prestige of Blue Note, his music has morphed from jazz with a sometimes overt soul to a kind of neo-soul with the occasional splash of jazz. That is a path that other singers have trod and in Porter’s case, it’s one not of commercial calculation but one taken to most sincerely synthesize the many strands that define his artistry.
But still, it is interesting to compare how Porter has evolved with his contemporary, Cécile McLorin Salvant. Early in the 2010s, Porter (in 2012) and McLorin Salvant (in 2011 and 2013) were the featured vocalists for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s annual series of festive concerts, Big Band Holidays. A collection issued in 2015, also titled Big Band Holidays, included two performances by Porter and four by McLorin Salvant. Porter is the suave traditionalist, especially on the resurrection of ‘A Cradle in Bethlehem,’ a song initially written for Cole. McLorin Salvant is the risk-taker, going to unexpected, thrilling terrain on ‘What Child Is This?,’ and, speaking of reclamations, singing the first, dark version of the lyrics for ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’ (here’s how it starts: “have yourself a Merry little Christmas / it may be your last.”). There’s a daring that now defines her as a jazz singer that couldn’t be applied to Porter. That’s not to slag him for being a traditionalist. They are necessary too. And few do it with Porter’s élan.
And now it’s another Yuletide and Porter, who, beyond Big Band Holidays and his collaboration with Fleming, closed his Nat Cole tribute album with an elegant version of Mel Tormé and Robert Wells’ ‘The Christmas Song,’ has now released a full-length seasonal album. Christmas Wish is a little bit of everything: three originals and a sample of the bedrock of the Christmas repertoire.
Its reach is admirable. It engages with both the secular and the sacred aspects of the holiday season. Yet, for whatever reason (I attribute it to how the album is sequenced), it doesn’t exactly cohere. Christmas albums, perhaps more than any other collection of popular song, require a unity of spirit to reach the listener and ingratiate itself to become a recurring, intrinsic musical companion of one’s celebrations. That’s not to say that Christmas Wish is a rote affair—it assuredly is not—it’s just that its joys are found more bountifully in the individual moments.
The album opens with ‘Silent Night,’ that happily indefatigable carol, and Porter doesn’t fuss around with it, singing it with intimacy, treating the performance as a welcome to the listener. There’s a sheen to it—the strings, for example, have a timelessness to them—that calls to mind the golden age of the pop album of the fifties into the sixties. Keep your eyes peeled for the swell of the orchestra at start of the repeat of the first verse and the small embellishments that Porter adds periodically. Perplexingly, what follows is a rushed, uncharacteristically tossed off ‘The Christmas Waltz’ that breaks the album’s mood, though the long coda is quite lovely with Porter, very agreeably, behind the beat.
That’s where Porter is often heard best: a languid presence, reassuringly, as opposed to assertively, there. That’s where he places himself on ‘Everything’s Not Lost,’ the first of three songs he wrote specifically for the album, and the best one of them. In many ways, it’s a prayer, a paean for hope as well as a testament to the enduring triumph of continuing to press ahead despite it all. It’s all there in the defiant refrain: “all is not lost, ’cause Christmas and New Year’s is comin’ on strong.” It resolves into a sophisticated strain of harmonic depth. The song is one catchy son-of-a-gun, full of earthy soulfulness. The other two songs from Porter’s pen may not reach the same height but they are both formidable.
The title track, reminiscent of the scene in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Woman in which the March brood give away their Christmas breakfast, is the kind of overt gospel number that Porter often drops on his albums that often feel strained even as here, the sentiment—remembering those less fortunate and actually doing something about it—is part of what makes Porter a man of sensitivity. It is even more eloquently elucidated on ‘Heart for Christmas’ which ends the album. If its sentiment—the suggestion behind the lines of “and so I’m offering this simple phrase / to kids from one to 92” of ‘The Christmas Song’—is well worn, it finds new life in Porter’s dedication to it. There’s a momentum on the bridge as he offers, “don’t let your light be faded by disappointing end / Christmas can renew your heart / be a child all over again,” that assures that he is a true believer.
The two selections Porter made from sixties Motown are studies in contrast. One is well worn, the other far less so. The latter, ‘Purple Snowflakes,’ written by Gaye with David Hamilton and Clarence Paul and recorded in 1964 was only released 28 years later (the melody and backing tracking were repurposed as ‘Pretty Little Baby,’ a hit for Gaye in 1965). Porter gives it a faithful reading right down to a group of female backup singers repeating the punctuations offered by the Andantes on Gaye’s version. The former is ‘Someday at Christmas,’ written by Ron Miller and Bryan Wells for Stevie Wonder in 1966. While Porter does right by it—unlike other singers, it is clear that he is actively engaging with the words while singing rather than merely reciting them as if by rote—I wonder what he could have done with another holiday song associated with Wonder, ‘It’s Christmas Time,’ which he wrote for Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, who recorded it in 1970. Its poignant setting of the Nativity story is just begging to be revived so that it can take its rightful place as a contemporary Christmas classic. Porter would be the right singer to do so.
The nods to the songs that are part of the established, inextinguishable Yuletide repertoire are not the obvious ones—the only true carol included is the aforementioned ‘Silent Night’—but Porter’s performances of them don’t necessarily add anything new to them. The exceptions are a sedate ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’ that resists a climax on the final, regal verse and a duet on a Frank Loesser standard. Luckily, it’s not the obvious one (‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’) but ‘What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?’ instead. Porter teams up with Samara Joy (whose own holiday collection, A Warm Holiday, is well worth your attention), another vocalist in the traditionalist vein and who, also like him, sings lyrics with a continuity of line that suggests they are being sung as paragraphs as opposed to individual sentences. Their back-and-forth on the song hints at a new reading of the song. Instead of it being a yearning for a love—almost certainly unrequited—it is here a ballad of two ships passing in the night, both bound for the same destination. It’s another of the moments that stands out on Christmas Wish.
Porter doesn’t break any new ground here in making a Christmas record but in doing so, he has created something that is free of cynicism and abundant in genuineness. That’s more than enough for me to recommend it.