Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell is an amalgam of improbabilities. First, there is his identity as a gay, African-American, Jewish, operatically trained bass who has chosen, as his musical specialty, Jewish/Yiddish art song. Then there is his even more unlikely melding of Yiddish folk song and African-American spirituals into a piece called Convergence , which he and klezmer consort Veretski Pass bring to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco on the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 6.
"My husband was one catalyst for my conversion," Oakland resident Russell told the Bay Area Reporter about his relationship with the Director of Youth and Family Education at Temple Beth El in Berkeley, Rabbi Mike Rothbaum. "But my entire life and way of viewing the world up until when I met him had been informed by beliefs, by narratives, and by Jewish Biblical texts from what people call the Old Testament.
"By the time I met Mike, I had a working knowledge of the Torah, and knew the texts of the Hebrew Bible inside and out. It led to some very interesting questions. It's good that I became a Jew, because it is all about asking questions."
A different set of questions led Russell, who was raised in Vallejo, from his former goal of becoming an operatic bass to his calling as a stunningly authentic, beautifully voiced singer of Yiddish art song. First was the issue of how to express himself with sensitivity via the standard operatic bass repertoire, which emphasizes stereotypical masculinity over vulnerability.
Russell sang in a few notable productions, including the West Coast premiere of The Life and Times of Malcolm X and San Francisco Opera's production of Philip Glass' Appomattox. But by the time he had moved to New York City and participated in a prestigious summer training program led by retired Metropolitan Opera diva Martina Arroyo, he discovered that not only did his West Coast experience mean nothing to New Yorkers, but that they also valued singers more for their "excessive volume" than for the emotional content of their art.
Literally one month after Russell encountered multiple career obstacles, he discovered Yiddish art song. "I wanted to develop something that was closer to who I was and how I felt myself to be," he reports. "The first person I found singing Jewish art song was this amazing, dark, deep bass of the Russian School, Sidor Belarsky, who lived 1898-1975. His vocal production matches mine very closely.
"The first time I heard Belarsky on recording was in the Coen Brothers movie A Serious Man, where someone puts on one of his records. I thought I was hearing myself."
The language turned out to be Yiddish. In the middle of learning Belarsky's repertoire, Russell began to hear within it echoes of Negro Spirituals, which most African-American singers learn with the expectation that they will, at the very least, perform them as encores. In short order, he realized that Jewish music and Negro Spirituals were composed at almost the same time and under similar circumstances, and that both derive from cultures that converted their folk music into something that could be savored in the concert hall.
Soon thereafter, Russell began composing vocal amalgams that combined both genres. He might start with a folk song about a child who was in Hebrew School, reciting the Talmud and crying because they missed their parent. Then he'd segue into "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."
"It was really interesting," he says, "because the texts scanned very closely to each other, to the point of lining up. They even shared the exact same words, like mother and home. Initially, I took one line from one and one from the other, and sang them all the way through a cappella. People kind of went insane, because they'd never heard anything like it whatsoever.
"I did a lot of work in order to sound authentic in both Yiddish song and spirituals. I switched back and forth between the two, so that sometimes the lines were blurred to the point where people couldn't tell when the switch was happening. It's in the blurring that Convergence emerged."
Photo: Courtesy the artist
Eventually Russell found collaborators. Two years ago, he participated with famed jazz keyboardist Anthony Coleman and klezmer clarinetist Michael Winograd in a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration at Symphony Space in Manhattan. He has since developed Convergence even further, and is now collaborating with Veretski Pass, musicians who specialize in Jewish music and music of the cultures that thrived around the Jews of Hungary.
Some of Russell's songs are preceded by short video animation. "The animation enables me to alternate readings from African-American works such as The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois with excerpts from Jewish literature by, amongst others, Israel Zangwill, a Jewish writer from the turn of the century," he says.
When not performing Convergence , Russell sings Yiddish repertoire. Next March, he and two other basses perform European Jewish Art Song at the Kennedy Center. He is also part of a "Boychick Band," collaborating with three Canadian vocalists who sing four-part harmony arrangements of Yiddish music from the 1920s and 30s.
Given all the boundaries he breaks, Russell is well aware that he is often viewed as a kind of curiosity. "I was in a Yiddish Vaudeville event, and announced as an up-and-coming singer on the Yiddish song scene. When I jogged out, people started to laugh because it was this black guy who was going to sing in Yiddish. Once I started singing, they stopped laughing."
Russell is not the only African-American singer to have such an experience. In 1924, when pioneering African-American tenor Roland Hayes dared to sing German art song (lieder) in Berlin's Beethoven-Saal, he faced 1,000 indignant music-lovers who began to hiss quietly, and then upped their opposition for close to 10 minutes. Hayes stood silently, his eyes closed in prayer until the audience grew still. Then he began with "Du bist die ruh" ("You are calm, you are the peace") by Franz Schubert. Shortly after song's end, the audience erupted in cheers and took to its collective feet.
Will Russell's audience do the same in San Francisco? This is but one of many questions that Jews and others will ponder as his show date approaches. What no one will need to question, once they hear him, is the depth of his sincerity, the authenticity of his delivery, and the beauty of his voice.
Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell and Veretski Pass, with visual artist Meredith Leichnew, explore Jewish and African-American music of exile, spirituality, hope and redemption on Sun., Sept. 6, 3 p.m., at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, 763 Mission St., SF. Tickets are included with museum admission. For more information, see thecjm.org or call (415) 655-7800.