The Grammy committee nominated 41-year-old Brooklyn jazz singer Gregory Porter’s “Real Good Hands” for best traditional R&B performance this year, but those same people gave the award to Beyoncé. Nevertheless, proximity to Beyoncé’s pop brilliance exposed him to a wider audience, and people began writing/blogging about his skills as a singer and the distinctive headgear—a thin hood that’s tight around the ears and topped by a thickish hat—he seems to always wear. The whole arrangement has a striking effect; it gives his face the appearance of a man who, on a cold city night, heats his hands over a fire in a rusty oil drum. Indeed, Porter is so committed to this headgear (picture after picture and performance after performance) that I became convinced that it had something to do with protecting or hiding an ear-related medical condition. But nothing is wrong with Porter; his ears are just fine. He just likes that look, which frames his handsome beard and long eyebrows. Porter—who has released two albums, Water and Be Good, with Liquid Spirit due in September on Blue Note—also always wears smart vintage suits, ties that are as elegant as Roger Duchesne’s in Bob le Flambeur, shirts that are almost bold, and shoes that have been shined by a man who has clearly spent a lifetime mastering the magic of shoe polish.
As for Porter’s voice, it’s a baritone that makes you feel right at home; as for his style of phrasing, it feels very familiar (Lou Rawls, Johnny Hartman, Nat King Cole), but it is also like nothing you have heard before. And this is why the greatness of Porter is not easy to describe. If you listen to him one way, he seems to be rooted deeply in the tradition of jazz song, but if you listen to him another way, you hear a big, warm, blue voice that moves about the music like some liberated balloon rising and falling in the wind. Porter is not conventional, yet he is, and for some reason he easily manages to be both without settling on one or the other.
For example, Porter’s rendition of “But Beautiful,” in the album Water, is seemingly about the ups and downs of love, about the way a romance can cause you so much joy and so much pain—but as Porter sings, as his voice moves from one line to the next, you get the feeling that this is not the whole picture. There is something else going on here that’s lost between the gaps in the lyrics.
Love is “a problem or it’s play,” he sings. “It’s a heartache either way/But beautiful/And I’m thinking if you were mine/I would never let you go/And that would be/But beautiful, I know.” What does “but beautiful” mean here? Nothing but beautiful? Everything but beautiful? And Porter puts as much meaning into that strange construction as Johnny Hartman does when he sings “Dedicated to You” on the jazz masterpiece John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman. “And if I should paint a picture, too/That showed the loveliness of you/My art would be like my heart and me/Dedicated to you.” The expressive meaning you find in “dedicated to you” is the same as the one you find in “but beautiful,” but we do not know what “but beautiful” means. It’s as if the words can contain the feeling without really constructing a meaning, words as pure containers of feeling. One is enchanted by this sense of getting it and not quite getting it. This is how Porter plays with your mind.
Then there is “Real Good Hands.” It’s about a man pleading to his girlfriend’s parents for their daughter’s hand in marriage. This is not the sort of situation most American men of the 21st century are familiar with or can even understand. Pleading for your girlfriend’s hand? You mean the parents can actually stop you from getting married? Back in the day they could, but not anymore. Despite the anachronistic setting of the tune, Porter sings it with true feeling, true emotion. You can see the room in the old house, see the parents on the couch (paintings of MLK and JFK above them). You can see their concerned faces, their doubts, and you can see this 21st-century Brooklynite on his knees, begging for the opportunity to be “her man” because she would be in “real good hands.”
Porter’s masterpiece, however, is “Be Good (Lion’s Song),” a simply charming waltz about a woman who seems to be teasing a man (the lion in a cage). Or maybe it’s not about that at all. Maybe it’s about art, or about how an idea can dance around your limitations without ever really settling and revealing itself. The gaps in the lyrics give Porter the freedom he needs to do what he always does best: drift around a beautiful tune. 
This article has been updated since its original publication.
