Bass-baritone Davóne Tines has built a reputation for doing things his way on the concert stage. The out 37-year-old Harvard and Juilliard graduate was given complete instruction on the how-to's of singing and program planning. He then had the nerve to make programs only he could make, sell them to a rapidly expanding audience, and garner a reputation as the singular artist he is.
Unsurprisingly, Tines's debut album, "Robeson" (Nonesuch), not only reflects his artistry; it's also one no other singer could match. Having devoted his career to transmogrifying "art music" as usually practiced, he might wish the same "freedom," the word defining his own music, for all his colleagues.
It may seem odd, on the surface, that this new CD is predicated on the life and art of Paul Robeson. But as it plays out, Tines's homage to America's legendary, some would say finest, Black performer of song, musical theater, and the stage suits Tines perfectly. That's primarily because, like his modern successor, Robeson was an activist working for Black rights at literally life-threatening risk levels, leading him to contemplate suicide in a Moscow hotel room after CIA-administered LSD.
It takes a few
For "Robeson," —and, one suspects, for his own artistic future— Tines has assembled a band he has named The Truth. The band's core membership is pianist John Bitoy and sound artist Khari Lucas, and Tines further credits the director Zack Winokur as co-creator of "my most personal artistic statement to date."
That said, "Robeson" is all but crowded by performers, vocalists and instrumentalists alike, working on Tines's wavelength, who do much more than contribute to this recording project. The album marks musical collaboration of the highest order, and "Robeson" would be unimaginable without every one of those voices.
Among the musicians Tines recognizes as influences, jazz giant Miles Davis stands out. In a way, jazz seems like the only word that characterizes this material and its aural means, though there's nothing particularly "jazzy" about the finished sound.
The songs on "Robeson" are many-layered and musically sophisticated, but, like the best jazz, they feel improvised, despite the manifest care that has gone into the arrangements (mostly by Tines) and the recording itself, which reaches Nonesuch's highest and most exacting standards.
Another homage
Still, other than to Robeson himself, Tines sings a tribute to Julius Eastman, the late Black gay composer and performer Tines calls "one of my idols, whom I call an ancestor." Experimentalist to the core, Eastman had his advocates in his own day (the 1980s and '90s), but like so many composers before him, died largely misunderstood and underappreciated, broke, alone, and in ill health, possibly from HIV infection.
It's tempting to say that Eastman's time has come. Many of today's most adventurous performers and ensembles, including full symphony orchestras, are revisiting his music in what is probably the boldest revival of a musically challenging gay composer since the ongoing resurgence of interest in the music (and life) of the late Canadian, Claude Vivier.
Tines writes about Eastman in his notes (which, on evidence, are part of the composition as a whole) for "Scandalized," the fourth track on the new recording.
A riff on the tongue-in-cheek (Tines's word) spiritual, "Scandalize My Name," it takes the listener to church stylistically as well as in spirit. Julius Eastman's brother Gerry, a jazz guitarist, takes a central place in the revelry.
Tracks of his tears
At no point is it in doubt that this album is the most serious of undertakings. Its principal theme is freedom and the grueling path to it. And in the notes to "Let It Shine" (an infinite gospel vamp" in Tines's words), the singer-composer acknowledges that, in ways similar to Robeson and Eastman, the album, which took shape during the pandemic, proceeds from Tines's own artistic low point. But it also charts the journey out of despair, and Tines is clear that, in composing and performing it, "I couldn't contain the joy of feeling that survival and personal change were possible."
"Fly Away," which present-day audiences may know primarily from the Baz Luhrman film, "Elvis," takes yet another Black spiritual and, well, flies away with it. Tines says it began with pianist John Bitoy's almost random practicing Ravel's "Le Gibet" the haunting third movement of the notoriously difficult "Gaspard de la nuit," before one of the recording sessions. It quickly morphed into a jam, only to become one of the wildest and most transfixing tracks on the album.
It also elicits some of the most compelling singing in head voice (falsetto) from Tines on offer in this collection. It completes the picture of his voice as it roams between the first rendition of "Ol' Man River," the song with which Robeson is most associated, when Tines favors the listener with sepulchral bass notes, and the last one, which seems like a different song altogether.
His "normal" range is baritonal, deployed with an uncommon sense of drama. But the departures from exact pitch and other givens of the recital platform are not failings but, rather, evidence of the singer's impressive range, in terms of expression as well as of vocal compass.
It's hard to communicate what a departure this is from the usual singer debut recording, say nothing of the ever-more-obligatory "theme" album. For all of its challenges —this is not music for the casual listener— Tines's songs are immediately absorbing, and in the end harder to let go of than to welcome.
"Some Enchanted Evening" has never sounded quite like this before, and "Todesbanden," based on a Bach cantata, won't pass any historical authenticity test while it sweeps you away. "The House I Live In" takes its inspiration from a short film starring Frank Sinatra and then returns from that land of encores to a hymn to promote racial and socioeconomic equality.
Tines calls "Lift Every Voice," sometimes called the Black national anthem with its words by James Weldon Johnson, his favorite song. It could also serve as the motto for this brave new program, where every song, and every voice, lift the willing listener up.
In related news: in that odd way of the recording industry box set, Sony Classical has issued all of Robeson's own recordings for Columbia, RCA, HMV, and Victor. The 14-disc set includes Robeson's 1944 production of Shakespeare's "Othello."
Davóne Tines, "Robeson," Nonesuch Records, CD and streaming.
www.nonesuch.com
www.alsoanoperasinger.org
www.davonetines.lnk.to
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