The 45-year-old American Jazz singer has had quite the success in recent years.
In 2014 he won the Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy for Liquid Spirit, before winning it again for 2017’s Take Me to the Alley.
Now the gentle giant in a hat is back with Nat King Cole and Me, featuring a 70 piece orchestra and some of the late Jazz legend’s greatest hits.
In an exclusive interview with Express.co.uk, Porter revealed why he chose Nat and who else he’d like to cover in the future.
Porter said: “Nat King Cole’s music was important to me from a very early age. I gotta hold of Nat’s music from five or six, from my mother’s record collection.
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From first hearing it, it just opened up my ears and – not too sound too flowery – opened up my heart.
“I used to listen to Nat’s music and imagine him as my father and friend, so this music has been important to me for the passing of my mother and just significant times in my life.
“It’s just been serious music in my life and a great influence, so this is the first record of Nat’s music I’ll be doing – maybe there’ll be others – but these are some of the most significant songs to me.”
On approaching a different kind of album, he revealed: “I always say to be organic and to approach it in a way that means something to me – having some emotional connection too.”
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Porter continued: “Pick Yourself Up (Dust Yourself Off) is a song I listened to and imagined these were personal words coming to me. Smile, the same thing. Nature Boy, very significant in that the last line, ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return’, that’s the type of song I aspire to write.
“My mother really loved that song and for me…it captures what I’m trying to do with music; to put some nugget or something very valuable in music that people can carry with them…can use to elevate their lives in some way.
“Stepping into this…I did it in the same way. There’s family stories in here, there’s personal stories, and I think that putting that type of emotion into the singing can make the music come alive.
On Nat’s influence as a singer, he added: “When a singer latches onto an artist, in a way to develop their own voice and then afterwards…slowly they take steps out of their comfort zone to perform other artists’ songs and then they develop their own voice. So Nat was a singer and I performed his music for a long time before I found my own voice.”
Porter admitted he sees his own voice as somewhere between Donny Hathaway and Nat King Cole.
He said: “I’m trying to bring jazz and the church together. The sacred and the serious and the comedic. I think [covering Donny is] something I will do in the future. I have some ideas for a soul-influenced jazz project.[Also] the great music of Bill Withers, I’d love to explore.
“[But] for me the first artist of significant influence I’m going to cover had to be Nat King Cole, because he was at the beginning of my musical understanding. [Hearing me sing], my mother said to me when I was five, ‘Boy you sound like Nat King Cole.’ I thought, ‘I need to find out who that is.’ So I broke into her records, I listened and it opened up a different thing.
“Of course I’d been exposed to the R&B and soul music that was on the radio and gospel music. But Nat’s music really touched me in an emotional way.”
Gregory Porter’s Nat King Cole and Me will be released on October 27, 2017, while his single Smile is available now.