Robeson, the debut solo album of bass-baritone Davóne Tines, gives its point of view away with its subtitle, “A Classical Americana Electro-Gospel Acid Trip.” The program recorded here premiered earlier this year on Manhattan’s Little Island, a recently created 2.4-acre public park on the Hudson River. An extremely personal artistic statement, the show is both a tribute to the career and struggles of the great bass-baritone Paul Robeson (1898–1976) and an examination of Tines’s racial identity and individual travails.
It’s hard to know what to make of the recording. Created in collaboration with director Zack Winokur and featuring The Truth (pianist John Bitoy and sound artist Khari Lucas), Robeson was intended for the stage and depends on visuals. As an audio-only project, it transfers poorly. The sonics are so compressed — soft and loud singing are mere decibels apart — that it’s impossible to get a sense of the size and depth of Tines’s voice. He drops just about as low as he can at the start of “Ol’ Man River” and soars far higher in extemporized supra-tenor riffs than Robeson ever ventured, but dynamic manipulation robs us of a full appreciation for Tines’s achievement.
Then again, that achievement is a bit of a jumble conceptually. While Tines’s liner notes refer to “Ol’ Man River” as the song that “founded” Robeson’s career, it’s worth remembering that Robeson was also famous as an actor. He made a noted debut in New York when he took over the leading role in the 1925 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, and he played Shakespeare’s Othello three times in his career. His profile only rose further when he starred in the 1928 London premiere of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat.
By the time Robeson appeared in the 1936 movie version of the boundary-breaking musical, he’d already participated in anti-imperialist actions in Britain. His commitment to racial equality and social activism increased over the years, making him a prime target during the McCarthy era. According to Tines’s notes, when the blacklisted Robeson was in political exile in Moscow in 1961, the CIA attempted to poison him with LSD. He survived a suicide attempt, but his remaining years were marked by seclusion and declining health (induced, at least in part, by CIA-manipulated medical intervention and electroshock therapy).
Robeson’s one-minute introduction, which includes a hummed snippet of “Ol’ Man River,” finds Tines impersonating the legendary singer, accompanied by Bitoy’s piano and Lucas’s synthesizer. By the second track, when the LSD begins to take hold, Tines as Robeson is singing “Some Enchanted Evening” amid the chatter of a supper club. Just as Robeson altered the lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” numerous times throughout his career, Tines changes the pronouns here to reflect his own identity as a gay man.
We then journey back to May 9, 1958, when Robeson performed an excerpt from Othello onstage at Carnegie Hall. From there, we hear Tines’s extremely personal and jazz-tinged arrangements of several spirituals, a riff on J.S. Bach, and a track that includes contributions from poet Mahogany L. Browne and three generations of women from Tines’s family. Robeson’s numerous quasi-hallucinatory twists and turns end with a version of “Ol’ Man River” whose synth track was inspired by the work of the Black queer Detroit-techno duo Drexciya.
Anyone with the slightest interest in contemporary music, racial equality, or the government subversion of views that challenge prevailing opinion may want to hear this recording. Tines, after all, is a major artist who has assumed leading roles in operas such as John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West and Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Whether you’ll want to play Robeson more than once is another question entirely.
