August 27, 2020
Two-time GRAMMY Award winning singer Gregory Porter will release his long-awaited sixth studio album ALL RISE tomorrow August 28 on Blue Note Records. The album will be available in deluxe and standard vinyl, CD, and digital versions.
Porter will be performing the album’s gospel-infused lead single “Revival” tonight on CBS The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Watch Porter’s heart-warming surprise appearance on ABC Good Morning America during a segment on Dr. Russell Ledet, the inspiring Louisiana doctor and founder of The 15 White Coats who is one of Porter’s biggest fans.
Following 2017’s heartfelt tribute album Nat King Cole & Me, ALL RISE marks a return to Porter’s beloved original songwriting. The 15-song set features Porter’s trademark heart-on-sleeve lyrics imbued with everyday philosophy and real-life detail, set to an exhilarating mix of jazz, soul, blues, gospel, and pop including the uplifting “Revival,” the classic ballad “If Love Is Overrated,” the stirring protest song “Mister Holland,” and the soulful ode to flight “Concorde,” which was launched last month in connection with NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission.
In their cover feature on Porter, DownBeat declared that “ALL RISE represents a significant step forward,” calling it “a willfully and artfully varied collection.” Produced by Troy Miller (Laura Mvula, Emili Sandé, Jamie Cullum), the album represents the evolution of Porter’s art to something even more emphatic, emotive, intimate, and universal too.
“Yes, you could say that I went big,” says Porter about his latest, which combines the talents of his longtime loyal bandmates, a handpicked horn section, a 10-member choir, and the London Symphony Orchestra Strings. “But, quite frankly, the way I write in my head, it all happens with just voice and piano first, and it’s built up from there. It feels good to get back to the rhythms and the styles and the feelings and the way that I like to lay down my own music from start to finish.”
As Porter worked out this album’s direction, he looked inward, upward, and around him, and arrived at a raison d’être found in the title, ALL RISE. “We hear that phrase when presidents or judges come into the room,” says Porter, “but I’m thinking all of us rise — not just one person being exalted. We are all exalted and lifted up by love. This is my political thought and my real truth. It comes from my personality, my mother’s personality, the personality of the blues, and of black people. It’s this idea of making do with the scraps, of resurrection and ascension, and of whatever the current situation is, it can get better through love.”
