John Fordham 

Gregory Porter Issues of Life: Features and Remixes review – an absorbing chronicle

This exhaustive collection of songs and remixes catches the quirky collaborations Porter has produced on his way to the top, writes John Fordham
  
  

Gregory Porter
Soulful … Gregory Porter. Photograph: Vincent Soyez

Gregory Porter is an international singing star now, a luminary of the Blue Note record label (and a prominent guest on this week’s iTunes festival), but these songs and remixes catch some quirky collaborations from his life on the way up. It includes a muscular, horn-heavy 2012 radio-edit of a version of Bobby Timmons’ Moanin’ with Austria’s Blue Brass band and some soaring Porter scat, a soulful and coolly bass-walking Be My Monster Love and the smokily wondering immigant-song Hope Is a Thing with Feathers, with post-Coltrane tenor-sax supremo David Murray. There is also a soulfully confiding account of Gil Scott-Heron’s Song of the Wind arrestingly introduced by impressionistic, percussion-whisperings, and the urgently bass-pumping Opolopo remix of Porter’s 1960 What?, the singer’s signature theme on his early gigs. And there are five tracks featuring soul-jazz collective Zbonics, including the yearning title track with its Headhunters-like keys textures. For those among the majestic Porter’s growing legion of fans who want to know more of his backstory, this compilation is an absorbing chronicle.

 

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