About the Event

We’d tell you Gregory Porter is back, but you probably already knew. You probably felt the earth rumbling, announcing the man’s bone-deep baritone, or you felt the air change as the warmth of his sound filled the atmosphere like a hug from above. 

All Rise, Porter’s Grammy®-nominated sixth studio album, marks a return to original songwriting—heart-on-sleeve lyrics imbued with everyday philosophy and real-life detail, set to a stirring mix of jazz, soul, blues, and gospel. It follows 2017’s Nat King Cole & Me, a Grammy®-nominated collection of songs performed or inspired by the legendary Cole. The Grammy®-stacking star—who’s dined with Stevie Wonder and sung for the Queen of England—remains blue-collar by blood. One of eight siblings raised by a minister mother in a poor part of Bakersfield, the young Porter found his voice both by singing in church and by studying his mother’s Nat King Cole records at home. 

Though Porter had an acclaimed role in the original 1999 Broadway cast of It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues—and staged his own Nat King Cole & Me musical in 2004—it was inevitable that he’d became known for his songs. That was made abundantly clear when both of Porter’s indie albums—2010’s Water and 2012’s Be Good—received Grammy® nominations, paving the way for his world-beating 2013 Blue Note debut, Liquid Spirit, which won the Grammy® for Best Jazz Vocal Album. He hasn’t let down his legion of fans since, whether collaborating with Disclosure on “Holding On,” scoring another Grammy® for Take Me to the Alley (2016), or telling his life story through Cole’s songbook.