Gregory Porter, Pizza Express, London

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With classy male jazz singers so thin on the ground, it is hardly surprising that Gregory Porter’s stage-owning tenor stood out at last year’s London Jazz Festival. Warm-hearted, soul-inflected and very much in command, Porter’s short cameos at the Barbican’s Jazz Voice and brief late spot at Ronnie Scott’s were a talking point.

At this gig, Porter stretched out with his New York quartet, deftly mixing self-penned lyrics with demanding jazz classics. His two sets were beautifully nuanced, and delivered with a controlled passion that was all the more impressive for this being a late-addition second house – the after-midnight show was squeezed in after the initial four-night season swiftly sold out.

Porter opened with Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”. A bass riff set the pulse; warbly sax added mood and Porter’s timing and diction immediately captured the inner strength of the original. Like Holiday, Porter gets to the heart of a lyric by making each word count and re-casting the melodic line. Thus, he set up the ballad “But Beautiful” with an exquisitely timed pause and rounded off the first set with an obliquely voiced “Work Song”. The second set began as an affectionate out-of-tempo duet and morphed to a mid-tempo waltz. And a mid-song request – “Can you turn down the piano in the monitor please?” – was sung so beautifully it could have been an invitation to romance.

Porter’s trump cards are his roots-and-relationship songs. “I Found My Way to Harlem”, the lyrics to Wayne Shorter’s aggressively modal “Black Nile” – here taken at a furious lick – and “1960 What?” draw on African-American history and aspiration and would stand up in any setting. “Be Good” – the title track of his excellent new CD – and “Real Good Hands” were thoughtful reflections on love and family that sat well over his solid rhythm section.

Jazz was no mere icing on the cake. Porter is a formidable improviser who mixes lyrics and scat into logic-driven solos, and there was room for his solid quartet to flourish. Pianist Chip Crawford thumped out two-handed crescendos and alto saxophonist Yosuke Sato veered oddly between tightly phrased bop and over-egged vibrato.

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