On Be Good, Gregory Porter’s astonishing follow-up to Water, 2011’s Jazzwise album of the year, Porter, one of the most accomplished jazz singer-songwriters to emerge in decades, picks up just where he left off on Water – but goes still further and deeper on the new album. Partly a homage to Harlem, the album in the process invokes the spirit of the Harlem renaissance, its abiding light Langston Hughes, and also the soul and jazz of Marvin Gaye and Motown. Be Good crucially captures in vivid detail Porter’s sense of oneness with the music, his sense of place, community and culture and their all-pertaining spirit and life force. Porter talks to Kevin Le Gendre.

Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has not been regularly cast in the role of dastardly enemy of democracy in the western imagination. It is easy to forget that the prospect of a ‘Red Dawn’, as styled in one of Hollywood’s most ludicrously jingoistic 1980s fantasies, was once frighteningly real.

Which is exactly why preparations were made to counter a lightning invasion from the dark forces of communism. Gregory Porter, a boy during the years when Reagan thought nothing of quoting Rambo as a guide to solving international crises, can recall the orders, issued on a regular basis in his high school, to steel all souls, come the fateful day.

“I remember being in the second, third and fourth grade, we planned for being bombed by Russia,” the singer told me, straight-faced in a Clerkenwell hotel where he was holed up during last year’s London Jazz Festival. “I remember the conversations about ‘the Russians are gonna get us!’

 This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #161 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE CD...