On His Way to Harlem: The Whimsical Soul of Gregory Porter

On His Way to Harlem: The Whimsical Soul of Gregory Porter

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

With signature Kangol with ear flaps pulled over his head—looking more the vagabond than the genius—Gregory Porter would have cut a figure in any era; but it is his voice—as original as they come—that surely arrests everyone’s attention.  Gregory Porter is among a generation of Black male jazz singers, including Jose James and Dwight Trible, who have made the choice against all logics to close ranks around a tradition that is so far removed from the Hip-Hop generation that there’s not a rearview mirror to consult.  Whereas both James, who covered Freestyle Fellowship’s “Park Bench People” on his debut Dreamer and Trible have managed to dance on the fringes of hip-hop style production,  Porter, save a few remixes, keeps it straight. As John Murph writes in a recent profile of Porter in Jazz Times, “There’s a very popular and profitable space where the theater intersects with true-blue jazz singing, but Gregory Porter ops for the latter.  He’s the real deal.”

Figures like Billy Eckstine, Nat King Cole, Jon Hendricks, Johnny Hartman, Arthur Prysock, Jimmy Scott, Joe Williams, Andy Bey, Ernie Andrews and Leon Thomas, among others, contributed to a rich tradition of jazz singing from the late 1940s until the early 1970s.  There’s no disputing that with emergence of Soul music in the late 1950s, jazz singing  became after-thought for many young Black vocalists.  Though Marvin Gaye really aspired for a career more in line with Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole (who he was long rumored to portray in a film and for whom he recorded an album length tribute after Cole’s death), such a career was untenable for his record label. 

The career arcs the  of Jon Lucien and Gil Scott-Heron in the 1970s are also instructive—neither would dare simply refer to themselves as jazz singers, though both were clearly indebted to that tradition.  When Bobby McFerrin released his eponymous debut in 1982, covering Smokey Robinson, Van Morrison, Wayne Shorter, and quickly shifted to Jazz’s version of Biz Markie—his great gift to the tradition being “Don’t Worry Be Happy” (Chuck D: “…was a number one jam, damn if I say it, you can smack me right here”—it was clear that jazz singing was largely a dead form to young Black male singers; Will Downing was going to be an R&B singer or worse, a Smooth Jazz vocalist.  Anyone remember Kevin Mahogany?

Born and raised in Bakersfield, CA, Porter and his seven siblings were reared by their mother, who was a former COGIC evangelist.  It was Porter’s mother Ruth who encouraged him to pursue singing as an art, though he also entertained a career as an athlete, playing linebacker at San Diego State, before an injury ended his career.  As he told Murph recently, his mother “creeps up in a lot of places in my art, whether I want her here or not.”  The reverence that Porter holds for his mother, and women in general, shows up in subtle and not so subtle way in his music. The more obvious reference is the track “Mother’s Song,” from Porter’s new release Be Good.  Less obvious are Porter’s covers of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” (from 2010’s Water) and Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” (from Be Good) both of which he does as unadorned a cappella performances.

Porter’s stellar debut, Water (2010), earned him a Grammy nomination, though it made him no more visible to Black music audiences and radio programmers.  Like so many American jazz artists, Porter has had to cultivate his audiences abroad, giving even more credence to that vagabond look he has crafted for himself: have song, will travel.  Porter is appreciative of his European and Asian audiences, telling Murph, “I’m not going over there aping some fake shit; they sense the authenticity…they tell you who you are in a way.  The shame is that not enough American audiences—Black audiences—even know who Porter is, let alone, have heard Water.

While Porter’s covers of “Skylark” and “But Beautiful” are simply breathtaking, charting the same classic territory Jose James visited on For All We Know, released the same year as Water, it is Porter’s originals that truly standout.  Tracks like “Illusion” and the title track “Water” recall the sparse ballads of Bill Withers during his +’Justments (1974) and Making Music (1975) period.  Yet, Porter is not afraid to come hard, as he does on the insurgent “1960 What?” which speaks back to a broad tradition within Black music of naming evil in the world. 

 

In the midst of the racist and systematic violence of so-called post-Race America,  Porter defiantly sing “Young man coming out of a liquor store • With three pieces of black licorice in his hand y’all • Mister police man thought it was a gun • Though he was the one • Shot him down y’all • That ain’t right, ” the title of the song a reminder that what was once, is still.  The power of the song has been captured in the remixes of the song, like Peter “Opolopo” Major’s “Kick & Bass Rurub” of the track.  As Porter told writer Siddhartha Miller in Water’s liner notes, “It’s an album of love and protest.”

The Gregory Porter that appears on Be Good, released in February on the indie, Harlem based Motéma Music label,  is one who is more polished.  Besides his rousing cover of Nat Adderley’s “Work Song,” there are several signature ballads, including the lead single “Be Good (Lion’s Song).”    The song perfectly captures the sense of whimsy that pervades Porter’s music—a quality that filmmaker Pierre Bennu placed front and center in his video treatment of the song, which conjures the “color” scenes from Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986).  “Real Good Hands” (with nods the Duke Ellington’s “Heritage”) is another standout, as the groom-to-be engages the quaint tradition of asking his bride-to-be’s parents for permission to marry their daughter.  Porter’s constant refrain of “I’m a real good man,” speaks volumes about his own negotiations within a marketplace has long forgot the value of regular folk.  Even with that headgear, Porter’s is just a hardworking, regular dude, trying to do the right thing.

 

The centerpiece of Be Good is the rollicking tribute to Harlem on the track “On My Way to Harlem.”  Packed with a celebratory nostalgia (“you can’t keep me away from where I was born • I was baptized by my daddy’s horn”), a sense of loss (“I found out through my way to Harlem • Ellington he don’t live ‘round here, he moved away, so they say”) and hope (I sure could use • some of those Blues • from Langston Hughes”), the song is a tour de force—one that Misters Baisden and Joyner, would do well to introduce their audiences to.  I’m sure Frankie Crocker would have loved it.

Porter’s emergence points to the troubling dynamic of contemporary Black art: as musical artists like Porter, THEESatisfaction, Santigold and The Robert Glaspar Experiment represent a relative renaissance in Black music—hand-in-hand with the new media platforms birthed in the broadband era—mainstream  media has turned a dead-era and blind-eye to it.  If not for the availability of Porter’s “Be Good (Lion’s Song)” or “Illusion” on sites like Youtube, even fewer folks would know of his art. 

Gregory Porter is on his way to Harlem, and we all should take his cue, and follow him there.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking For Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). He is professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University and the host of the Weekly Webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Still the ‘Best Intentions'?: Edmund Perry Case Resonates Years Later

Still the ‘Best Intentions'?: Edmund Perry Case Resonates Years Later

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

If there was a shared belief regarding the promises of the Civil Rights Movement, it was the faith that with the legal limits of segregation removed, young Black Americans would be able to achieve the American Dream if they adhered to a program of hard work and dutiful study. 

In June of 1985, Harlem bred Edmund Perry seemed the embodiment of that faith, having just graduated from one of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools with his first year at Stanford University awaiting him in the fall. Instead, 17-year-old Perry was shot to death in his Harlem neighborhood by a White undercover detective, in what was “officially” termed an act of self-defense.  Nearly three decades after his shooting, Edmund Perry’s death still resonates in meaningful ways.

On the evening of June 12, 1985, Perry and his 19-year-old brother Jonah, a second year student at Cornell University, were walking on Morningside Drive in Harlem.  After a skirmish with an undercover police officer, Perry was shot in his abdomen and died shortly thereafter. 

The story of Perry’s death elicited many public responses, particularly in the context of regular charges of police brutality directed at the New York City police department. Suspicions of the NYPD occurred in the aftermath of the questionable deaths of the graffiti artist Michael Stewart and 66-year-old Elenor Bumphers who was shot-to-death during a forcible eviction in the Bronx.  As noted cultural critic Nelson George queried at the time of Perry’s death, “Was Edmund, like so many other victims of this city, just too black for his own good?”

Less than a month after Perry’s death, a police investigation cleared the officer of any wrongdoing and Jonah Perry was indicted on charges of assault of the police officer. Perry’s family was represented by attorney C. Vernon Mason, who along with attorney Alton Maddox, who successfully defended Jonah Perry, and the Reverend Al Sharpton, would form the political triumvirate that came to national prominence in the late 1980s in response to the rape case of Tawanna Brawley and the murder of Yusef Hawkins. Edmund Perry’s death was one of the many events that inspired Spike Lee’s depiction of racial tensions in New York City in his film Do the Right Thing (1989)

Yet the predominate question after Perry’s death was not about the reality of police brutality, but rather how someone with so much promise and opportunity, could engage in such reckless behavior?

Commentary on Edmond Perry’s life and death became a referendum on the continuance of poverty, racism and the failure of liberalism—a belief by some, that even given the opportunity to attend preps schools like Exeter or Westminster, a “culture of poverty,” doomed  some Black students to failure.

Edmund Perry’s death became part of the national imagination, notably the publication of journalist Robert Sam Anson’s Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry (1987), which was later adapted into the television movie Murder Without Motive: the Edmond Perry Story (1992).  Perry’s killing was also fodder for a first season episode of Law and Order called “Poison Ivy” (1990). Even the late Michael Jackson offered comment; his short film for “Bad” (1987), directed by Martin Scorsese with a screenplay by novelist Richard Price (Clockers) was inspired by Perry’s story, with Jackson et al firmly suggesting that it was the culture of the hood that took Perry under. 

It is Anson’s book though that has clearly been the last word on Edmund Perry.   Though Anson was for the most part sympathetic to the broad and specific circumstances that led to Perry’s death, he was hamstrung by his inability—and much of White America for that matter—to wrap his head around why Black kids like Perry and so many others were not simply thankful and happy for the opportunities that prep schools afforded. Throughout the book, Anson takes at face value the view among Perry’s White school mates that he was angry and obsessed with race, some suggesting that perhaps it was anti-White racism that might explain his attack on a White police officer.

As a student, Edmond Perry was the product of A Better Chance (ABC), an organization founded  in 1963, with the goal of creating a pipeline of talented students of color into elite prep schools, themselves serving as pipelines to the nation’s best colleges and universities. A Better Chance, is one of the great success stories of the Civil Rights Era—Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is one of the program’s alumni—but in the 1980s when Perry attended many of the prep schools had yet to come to terms with the real challenges that kids like Perry faced trying to negotiate the expectations of places like Exeter and the realities of the home spaces that always had to return to.  

Apropos for an era noted for a crack-cocaine epidemic, some Black students experienced these “two worlds” like a version W.E. B. Dubois theory of “double-consciousness” on crack. Some elite prep schools were simply ill-equipped to address the trauma that some of these kids experienced. As one of Perry’s three Black teachers described that experience in Best Intentions, “They will never again be part of the world from which they came…Everyone who comes to Exeter loses their homes. It goes with the territory.” (154)

And “home” was often ambivalent about what to do with these “success” stories.  As one of Anson interviewers offered, Perry “died a natural death” in Harlem, a reminder of the lack of value placed on Black bodies in some communities no matter what your SAT scores were.  Another of Anson’s respondents, a Black women who had traveled a similar academic trajectory in the 1970s, puts this disconnect in full context, noting that the kind of confidence and even hubris that “can get you elected student body president at Exeter can get you shot in Harlem.” (94)

Edmund Perry was representative of a cultural schizophrenia that afflicted a generation of young Black Americans, who were sold on the liberal world that was the post-Civil Rights era, only to find that their experiences with racism and prejudice, were only different than those their parents and grand-parents experienced, not non-existent.  Very often such racism took the form of benign ignorance about the lives of Black people, though when such incidents occur repeatedly—proverbial questions like “why do all the Black kids sit together?”—they take on a more purposeful effect.

Part of this schizophrenia was derived by the inability of some Black kids to get a true reading of what their academic skill set was.  Thus when Black students are lauded for their academic achievements, they are sometimes unsure whether such accolades are recognition of academic success in general or success simply for Black kid.  In other words, “am I smart?” or “smart for a Black kid.” 

No doubt those kind of questions dogged Perry from the time that he entered Exeter. When combined with the regular practice of Whites expecting that Black kids attended prep schools only as affirmative action admissions or as athletic studs—Perry was famously average as an athlete—Perry’s experience at Exeter was admittedly toxic.

At Exeter, Perry did not struggle in isolation—many of his Black peers were having similar experiences.  Anson notes that Exeter became increasingly aware of a restlessness among its Black students or as one White faculty member described it, “a sullenness about them…real sense of hostility and confrontation.” (156)

What Exeter and most of America failed to discern at the time was that Perry and  his peers were part of the first cohort of what would become known as the Hip-Hop generation.  This would be the  generation of college-aged Blacks that would embrace the music and politics of Public Enemy and KRS-One, who would register to vote for the first time in order to cast a vote for Jesse Jackson, and who would be Spike Lee’s core audience for his brand of Cultural Nationalism.

What many observers sensed as anger among this cohort of Black prep schools kids, might be better explained as their acceptance of the utility of their prep school educations.  As one of Perry’s instructors suggested in Best Intentions, Perry “never professed any great love of learning…it was what learning could bring for him—what he could acquire from it.” (139).  This rather pragmatic view of “opportunity” would be a hallmark of the generation of high achieving Blacks, who came to maturity during the 1980s, in both their schooling and experiences in Corporate America.  Their striving was a means to an end as opposed to an end unto itself.

Late in the book, Anson disingenuously introduces readers to the fact that that Perry was a sometime drug dealer and user.  Anson’s divulging of this information has the effect of highlighting Perry’s inability to survive the pressures of living in multiple worlds. His choice to deal drugs represents a moral burden that his White peers (users) did not have to carry.

There are many reasons to suspect why Perry dealt drugs to his White classmate at Exeter.  In interviews with those who knew him, Perry was described as a kid who was stridently opposed to paying any attention to what others might have thought of him.  This again something that was indicative of his generational cohort, who might be the first generation of Black Americans whose lives were not ordered by the presence of the “White Gaze”—the very source of DuBois’s theory of “double-consciousness.”   Entering Exeter, Perry simply did not care what White people thought of him.

In his last year at Exeter, Perry’s drug dealing and drug use was most pronounced, though still unknown to school administrators.  To accept the theory of one of Anson’s interviewers, Perry had become “weary.”  What Perry and so many Black over-achievers have experienced is not simply the stereotypes that they inspire, but the racial scripts that are set in motion which ultimately dictate how racialized experiences play out. 

Thus Black kids are not just seen as lazy or criminal, but there are a set of expectations set in motion in response to those stereotypes.  By the end of his four years at Exeter, it was simply easier for Perry to accommodate a script that suggested that a kid from Harlem must also be drug dealer, as opposed to a emerging scholar.  Indeed his regular tales to his White classmates about his street rep in Harlem was part of his negotiation of that script.  Perry was no hard-core dealer, though living in Harlem, he certainly bore witness to the drug trade.

In the end, a Black male professional who was close to Anson and knew Perry well—Anson’s version of the “my one black friend” narrative that we are all familiar with—suggests  that Perry was “worn out,” coming to terms with the reality that he was never simply going to be “Eddie Perry,” but always  “Eddie, the smart black.” (207)

As such one popular theory of Edmund Perry’s demise is that he simply lost his mind. But saying that Perry was crazy is a much too casual way to explain a mental and emotional state that far too many Black over-achievers and lay people experience on a daily basis. To suggest that Perry lost his mind on that June night in 1985 is to let racism and racialized violence—in its myriad forms—off the hook.  

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming "Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities" (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

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