Ryan Porter: Resilience and Optimism

By Gary Fukushima I Aug. 13, 2024

Trombonist Ryan Porter with members of the collective West Coast Get Down at the Los Angeles premiere of *Resilience,* a new documentary about his life.
(Photo: Benji Garcia)

On a warm June night at the annual Hollywood Bowl Jazz Festival, where nearly 18,000 people packed onto the benches of the historic Los Angeles-based amphitheater for nearly 16 hours of music over two days, saxophonist Kamasi Washington took the stage with his father and some of his closest childhood friends, better known collectively as the West Coast Get Down. Featured among the pyrotechnical solos by Washington, Thundercat, Cameron Graves and Brandon Coleman was a loping, short-form cyclical ballad by trombonist Ryan Porter, who composed that tune for the soundtrack to a documentary about his life that would premiere at the Regent in downtown L.A. just a few days later.

The film, Resilience: The Story of Ryan Porter (The Variety Group), rightfully portrays Porter as a generationally successful artist, particularly in 2022, when he found himself performing at the highest of high-profile shows, from the talk shows of Jimmys Fallon and Kimmel, to the Oscars and Grammys, to backing up Eminem, Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre at the Super Bowl halftime show held that year in Inglewood, mere miles from where he grew up. But the film also points to the challenges Porter has faced, including a life-altering illness and being homeless, inconceivably at the very same time his career was at an all-time high.

The day before the premiere, Porter and filmmaker Marquell Byrd met at a popular breakfast spot by the ocean in Playa Del Rey to speak with DownBeat about the film. Porter had yet to see the final cut, opting to wait until the premiere. “I wanna know what happens to Ryan!” he joked. But the humble brass man wanted to talk more about those who helped him and his friends along the way: his trombone teacher, George Bohannon, his high school teacher, Fernando Pullum, and the most important mentor in his life, Reggie Andrews (whose enduring comments before his death nearly two years ago are memorialized in this documentary). “That’s kind of what this is,” Porter said, “knowing what that looks like when that happens. Thundercat is what that looks like, Kamasi is what that looks like — they’ve had that community, that village. I just want to kind of give those people their roses, that hopefully inspires people to give back in the ways that they can. Truly that’s what I feel is the message of this documentary.”

Porter first met Washington as a teenager, at JazzAmerica, the Los Angeles youth program founded by Buddy Collette, the famous reed player who hailed from Watts. They both eventually were recruited by Andrews, a saxophonist and session musician who started an after-school jazz band at Locke High School in Watts, from which came some notable artists in the annuls of L.A. folklore: Patrice Rushen, Ndugu Chanceler, Gerald Albright, Rickey Minor, the hip-hop group The Pharcyde, and even actor Tyrese Gibson. Andrews would add to that esteemed list Porter, Washington, Graves, Ronald and Steven “Thundercat” Bruner, and Terrace Martin, among others. “Reggie would come pick all the kids up and take us over to Locke on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Porter recalled. “He would pick us up and drop us all off in his van and buy us McDonald’s or whatever we wanted afterward.”

Andrews’ example is inspiring to Byrd, who had organized music engineering and production workshops for inner city youth in New York before relocating with his wife back to her hometown of Compton in 2018 to start an arts organization together there. “My organization Color Compton, our whole thing is using art as a tool to understand our history,” Byrd explained. Porter was the only respondent to a call from Byrd for musicians to shoot a video about L.A.’s Central Avenue Jazz Festival. After that initial interview, Byrd realized Porter would make an excellent subject for a short film. He planned on releasing a short, 8-minute video back in 2022, but the hard drive it was on crashed, and the project was put on hold while the contents were being recovered. By the time they got around to finishing the film, they were able to add more than 40 minutes of additional interviews and concert footage (including Porter’s appearance with Washington at the Bowl just a few days prior). “You know that saying, God works in mysterious ways,” said Byrd. “Everything happens for a reason, because now we have a solid rip.”

There are many poignant moments in the film, as when Porter talks about moving to New York to attend Manhattan School of Music, how he struggled to survive compared to the other students there who hailed from more advantageous socioeconomic backgrounds. But there were brighter moments — Porter recounted to DownBeat that he spent time in New York with two of his heroes, J.J. Johnson (“he was my Michael Jordan”) and Roy Hargrove. Porter remembers going to Johnson’s house, where the master trombonist told him he gleaned his melodic approach from transcribing a lot of Lester Young.

It was while in school at MSM that Porter discovered he had ulcerative colitis, a debilitating digestive tract illness that remained with him as he moved back from New York to L.A., continuing to worsen even as his career was taking off. In 2019, Porter had to undergo the extreme remedy of surgery to remove his colon. The very next year, COVID essentially eliminated all forms of live performance income for musicians, forcing Porter into poverty and homelessness, exacerbated by his medical condition. One particularly heartbreaking clip shows Porter driving around the neighborhood of Mar Vista, pointing out where he would park his car to sleep for the night. He did this even after a performance at the Hollywood Bowl back in 2022. “My worst fear was that I would be burned alive in my car,” he tells the camera.

At the premiere, during a Q&A session with Porter and Byrd, a woman raised her hand. It was Porter’s own sister, tearfully telling him she had no idea he was homeless then, and she would have gladly let him stay with her had she known. Porter (who has since found a home in Playa Vista, near the ocean and the breakfast spot where we met) told her and the audience, “The thing with that situation is that it’s so humiliating, you don’t want anyone else to know.”

Byrd admires Porter for nevertheless revealing his story in such a public fashion. “I think just being transparent and open to being able to share this information is knowledge,” he said. “When I was growing up, there were so many things that I didn’t have access to, resources to be able to do certain things, whereas like someone like Ryan, knowing that he traveled the world, [saying], I was [from] the community, yes I’ve been able to do this, and you can too. I’m standing right in front of you and I’m teaching. … I’m giving you the steps and tools to be successful in this area.”

Porter now teaches jazz to at-risk youths in a community center run by his former teacher, Fernando Pullum. “I give free lessons for the after-school program,” he said. “I get the chance to learn how to work with kids … and they get the opportunity to learn how to play an instrument. It’s crazy to see that, to see myself in them, so I understand people like Reggie and Fernando a little bit more. That’s really what I feel like primarily the documentary is about: being the beneficiary of somebody who did that for me, and now it’s my turn.”

Porter’s last album, the soundtrack to Resilience, is bookended with his first, The Optimist, released in 2018 but recorded a decade earlier. Porter titled his album after the sentiment he felt regarding Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign. “It was a very nostalgic time,” he offered astutely, given all that’s happened to the country and in his own life since then.

Is Ryan Porter still an optimist? “It’s a choice you make. There’s peaks and valleys, and to really be optimistic, sometimes it’s challenging in the midst of this whole thing.” Porter witnessed how his idols succumbed to their struggles, Johnson with his health and Hargrove with his addiction. “I knew he was doing drugs, and I was just devastated,” he said of Hargrove. “You don’t have to touch the fire to know it’s hot.”

Porter continued, “I have guidelines for myself, so I guess it’s just not losing those. It was the optimism of believing in you being you. You don’t have to be like Roy Hargrove or Snoop Dog, or J.J. Johnson. In L.A., you get influenced, especially as a young person growing up in the inner city, vibing with sometimes the wrong people. … So, luckily, I had friends and people like Reggie Andrews. All the teenagers that were in the program with us, probably including myself, we had luggage, you know what I’m saying, starting off. That’s what makes the importance of Reggie changing the trajectory. He would say, ‘You know you want to change. I don’t want to tell you just not to use drugs — let me show you what else to do.’ I feel like that’s a good place to be, that’s what I want to do. It’s not every kid, but I’ve changed a lot of lives so far.” No wonder, given Porter’s gift to them of the example of resilience and optimism in his own life. DB