ROBESON with Davóne Tines and The Truth
Davóne Tines and The Truth’s new work ROBESON explores the musical repertoire of Paul Robeson alongside pianist John Bitoy and sound artist Khari Lucas.
Produced by the Barbican
Part of Davóne Tines Artist Spotlight
ROBESOИ was originally commissioned, developed, and produced by Little Island, Artistic Director Zack Winokur, Executive Director Laura Clement
With support from the Ford Foundation, ROBESOИ was funded by the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and commission support from Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa, and with deepest gratitude to Julie Mehretu, Kurt Chauviere, Shelly Hazel, Karen Molleson, the Steve Novick Charitable Gift Fund, Susan Baker, Noreen Buckfire, Paul Buttenweiser, Ellen Rosenau, Mary T Schneider, and Eli Wald.
Details
Programme and Performers
ROBESOИ conceived by Davóne Tines and Zack Winokur
directed by Zack Winokur
Prelude music by Davóne Tines, John Bitoy, Khari Lucas
Some Enchanted Evening music by Richard Rodgers; lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II;
arrangement by Davóne Tines and John Bitoy
Othello music by Davóne Tines, John Bitoy and Khari Lucas
Scandalized arrangement by Davóne Tines, Khari Lucas, John Bitoy, Ian Askew and Gerry Eastman
Fly Away music and lyrics by Davóne Tines, John Bitoy, Khari Lucas and Ian Askew
Nobody KnowsTraditional African American Spiritual; arrangement by Davóne Tines
Todesbanden music by Johann Sebastian Bach; arrangement by Davóne Tines and Al Carlson
The House I Live In music by Earl Robinson; lyrics by Abel Meeropol (under the name Lewis Allan); arrangement by Davóne Tines, John Bitoy, Khari Lucas and Ian Askew
Lift Every Voice music by J Rosamond Johnson; lyrics by James Weldon Johnson; arrangement by Davóne Tines
Let It Shine Traditional folk song; arrangement by Davóne Tines
Epilogue written by Mahogany L Browne, Davóne Tines and Ian Askew
Old Man River Traditional
Davóne Tines bass-baritone, concept
Khari Lucas electric bass, sound artist
John Bitoy piano
Zack Winokur concept
Little Island curator
Kai Harada sound design
Mary Ellen Stebbins lighting design
James Melling sound supervisor
Rich Howell lighting supervisor
Shira Kagan-Shafman producer
Programme notes
PRELUDE
= SINGING IN THE SHOWER
+ DOO-WAP ANCESTORS
+ SELF REFLECTION
Those that know me know that the shower is my favourite place in the world. The warmth, moisture, soothing white noise, and amazing acoustics make it the perfect place to feel safe and grounded in my transient life. It’s also the best practice room for singing and living. The reverberant yet focused acoustic allows me to gently make micro musical and technical choices without spending my vocal cords. The shower is where I get my best ideas and make big decisions and self-discoveries. Paul Robeson’s poison-induced journey takes place in a bathroom where he also made big discoveries and huge decisions. He (we?) hum a bit of ‘Ol Man River’ as if to ponder it; to assess our connection to it. It’s the song that’s founded his career but has also continued to morph lyrically as his life and politics progress. Background voices also appear. Are they ancestors inviting self-reflection and guidance? Are they the early fraying of self? The trip begins.
SOME ENCHANTED EVENING
= OLD TIME CROONING
+ R&B WHIMSY
+ YEARNING TO FIND SELF
Perhaps Robeson has momentarily re-entered the party from which he took a reprieve in the bathroom. Perhaps he’s singing to the party goers. Perhaps he’s just imagining the whole party in his head. Perhaps he is staring in the mirror singing to himself. The venom of his naysayers (incarnate as LSD from the CIA) further split his consciousness and he sees in the mirror the self he’d like to be. But that person is far away, across a crowded room.
John Bitoy brilliantly improvised the accompaniment to this song, which inspired me to make spontaneous timbre choices fluctuating between grander classic Rodgers & Hammerstein style and more intimate contemporary, at times R&B-inflected, crooning; Maybe a way of revealing more oscillation between the exteriority and interiority of self.
OTHELLO
= SHAKESPEARE AT CARNEGIE HALL
+ EXTENDED PIANO AND SYNTHS
+ NAMING THE SCORN
In his epic 1958 Carnegie Hall recital, Robeson performed the final monologue from Shakespeare’s Othello. Robeson was a consummate stage and film actor and championed the role of Othello from the UK to the US. He revelled in the role for its ability to channel his emotional response to existing in America, saying ‘Othello in the Venice of the time was in practically the same position as a coloured man in America today’. When asked why I create works that engage with social and racial existence, I’ve said that ‘If I were to engage fully with the 400 some years of oppression in America multiplied by the millions of Black people that suffered it, if I was to really touch that, I would run down the street punching white people in the face. So instead, I make work where I can more productively channel all that energy.’ I deeply connect to Robeson’s use of performance to find catharsis and the opportunity to name and interrogate the contexts in which he exists.
SCANDALIZED
= SPLIT PERSONALITIES GO TO CHURCH
+ GERRY AND JULIUS EASTMAN
+ KEEP MY NAME OUT OF YOUR MOUTH
Speaking of art as catharsis, I can’t imagine that Robeson didn’t sing the tongue-in-cheek spiritual Scandalize My Name without the thought of calling out his naysayers from multiple arenas. In addition to the dare I say run-of-the-mill racism Robeson waged against on the daily for existing while Black, his disparagement took many forms and scales given his profile and political views as a socialist. His concerts caused protests such as the 1949 Peekskill riots where protestors threw rocks, brandished baseball bats, burned a cross and lynched an effigy of Robeson.
The Associated Press fabricated remarks he made to seem deeply anti-American leading to national condemnation. He was investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for his interactions with international leaders in the socialist movement in a series of congressional hearings where fellow high-profile Black, baseball phenomenon Jackie Robinson testified against him. At one point the NAACP dissociated from Robeson, a board member calling him ‘an ingrate’ for his communist political views.
I, too, have been disparaged with malicious intent at a time of intense vulnerability. In no way on the scale of Robeson’s detractors, but definitely from people I share a field with and at extreme personal expense. So, I too sing this song as a means of pointing a grinning, critical finger at those who have spoken against me.
Our version of the song kaleidoscopes from a more straight up Robeson delivery, to a liminal gospel space where the fracturing of self is in full effect. Two voices sing in interruption and dialogue. Is it Robeson talking to himself? Facing a taunting naysayer? Or Robeson in conversation with me? All the above?
When I recorded the piece, I was blessed to have Julius Eastman’s older brother Gerry Eastman play guitar. He is a consummate jazz guitarist, having recorded with the likes of Nancy Wilson and Ella Fitzgerald. We first met so I could get to know him and more about his brother, one of my idols who I consider an ancestor. Gerry now stewards his brother’s posthumously formed estate and upholds the mission to see that Julius’s catalogue is preserved and performed with care.
Gerry saw firsthand Julius’s struggles with fitting into the confines of classical music and encouraged him to come over to his world of free jazz as a means of escape from persecution. Julius, famously disparaged by his contemporaries, was of course no stranger to the malicious scandalisation of his name and legacy. The song also quotes the tambourine music from the finale of Julius’s epic Stay on it, a piece he intended to help ‘bring the beat back’ into classical music.
FLY AWAY
= IMPROMPTU JAZZ IMPROV
+ RAVEL
+ THE NEED TO ESCAPE
This came about after the band was wandering back into the studio while John started practising Ravel’s haunted ‘Le Gibet’ from Gaspard. Khari started riffing on bass and Ian Askew, our incredible dramaturg and creative doula, sat at the drums. I decided to join the moment and sing a slinky version of the spiritual I’ll fly away, a song the band had toyed with in other aesthetics over the past few months. What started as disparate riffing, coalesced into a full-on jam session over Ravel’s dark, warm harmonies. I see the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot as I see many spirituals: suicide notes. Enslaved people’s coded language for the need to escape to a new place, whether that be freedom in life or freedom in death. This song is the moment in the bathroom where Robeson almost ended it all. It’s the moment where I almost gave up.
NOBODY KNOWS
= SONG OF PERSEVERANCE
+ DRONES & BELLS
+ GRATITUDE
The traditional Negro Spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen is a song I’ve sung for years. It is a place of peaceful reflection, a place where silent tears stream and dry, a place that gives you the chance to reflect on all you’ve been through and rejoice that you, alone, know and can access the depth, pain, joy, transcendence and peace of having made it to the other side.
I love singing with a drone. A bass line reduced to its most literal and fundamental. It allows a gorgeous simultaneity of groundedness and freedom. A sense of timeless, boundless place and space. I’ve also always been inspired by Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ Concierto de Aranjuez (Adagio) that begins, like Julius Eastman’s Feminine, with high rustling and twinkling ethereal bells. For me it sounds like the AMSR of the divine.
TODESBANDEN
= BACH
+ 808s
+ REBIRTH
At his Carnegie Hall recital, Robeson also sang a version of the Bach chorale ‘Christ Lag in Todesbanden’ (From Cantata BWV4) which he translated as ‘He lay in the bonds of death’. The chorale is in celebration of Jesus’s resurrection. I shifted the lyrics to place the singer as the one who’s been reborn. For example, changing ‘Therefore let us joyful be’ to ‘Therefore he will joyful be’ so that Robeson or I could celebrate the personal moment of rebirth that occurs when you decide, or are able to move through deep struggle and find a new life on the other side.
I encountered my first Bach chorales in college when I sang with the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, a mixed-voice choir focused on large-scale choral works on Renaissance polyphony. I also studied western harmony in Harvard’s notoriously storied theory course Music 51, taught by John Stewart, a kind of mad hatter of Baroque harmony. He had a priest-like love for Bach, but more so for his bass lines for their grounding inevitability, yet beguiling possibility of surprise and metamorphoses. He treated them like incantations; recipes for sonic incarnations of the divine. /
Todesbanden is an opportunity to praise the bass line. I wanted to spell out the incantation as epically and contemporarily as possible, so I chose the bass instrument of modern popular music: the 808. Dating from the early 1980s, the Roland TR-808 electric drum machine, with its deep, punchy sound, permeates rap, hip-hop and much contemporary pop music. We also used multiple synth organs to show an ever-shifting and evolving, morphing texture of the bass line’s realisation; showing that a bass line is a foundation of life, but can be incarnate in myriad ways.
THE HOUSE I LIVE IN
= FRANK SINATRA
+ MARY LOU WILLIAMS
+ THE NEED TO TELL IT LIKE IT IS
So now that you’re reborn, what are you going to say with all that new clarity? The House I Live In is a 1945 short film starring Frank Sinatra with themes of opposing anti-semitism and unified American identity. Sinatra sings the title-song with music by Earl Robinson and lyrics by Abel Meeropol under the pen name Lewis Allan. Robinson was later blacklisted for being a member of the Communist party. The second verse was cut from the film for the line ‘neighbors white and black.’ Robeson, Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke each covered the song, and Sinatra kept it in his repertoire, performing it at a state dinner during the Nixon administration, and at the 1985 inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Robeson likely performed the song because of its clear call for racial and socio-economic equality.
Older versions of the song present the idea of equality as a hope for the continuation of an incarnate American ideal. Taking on the song in 2024, I felt the need to forgo subtlety and directly name how that ideal has, in fact, never been incarnate. I wrote an entire new text for verses 2 and 3 that specifically articulate how this dream of America is continually deferred.
In September 2023, I sang the Black National Anthem Lift Every Voice for the inauguration of Claudine Gay to the presidency of Harvard University. She was the first Black first, Black-female president of my alma mater. It was a singular moment of joyful serenity to sing for her, her family from Haiti, and an evolving academic community of which I was a part. It was the most concrete marker of progress I have ever experienced. But three months later she was forced to resign amid controversy from a biased, blunt and tone-deaf congressional hearing on antisemitism, as well as a torrent of anti-black and anti-woman fuelled hyper-critique of her person and academic career. To watch her be immolated was one of the most horrifying things I have ever experienced. Reflecting on the events, I couldn’t listen to a draft of The House I Live In without the idea of a fire-jazz Mary Lou Williams-inspired choir entering in the third verse when the lyrics get really real in calling out the inescapability of America’s bloody primal sin and its inability to foundational evolve. The house we live in is burning.
LIFT EVERY VOICE
= THE BLACK NATIONAL ANTHEM
+ THE VOICES OF HARLEM
+ PRESENTING A POSSIBILITY
Lift Every Voice and Sing – also known as the Black National Anthem – is my absolute favourite song. It’s a far better candidate for a national anthem than The Star-Spangled Banner because it doesn’t propose that sovereignty is only possible through the conquering of enemies. Lift Every Voice presents an idea for nationhood based on the notion of a diverse collective coming together in the present to remember the atrocities of the past as a means of imagining a positive future. Robeson sang the anthems and folksongs of many different cultures to demonstrate how all, especially the disenfranchised, are connected. Singing this song is my way of connecting to Robeson’s politics and moving his ideals forward.
LET IT SHINE
= INFINITE GOSPEL VAMP
+ THE UNIVERSE AND THE KITCHEN SINK
+ LOVING WHAT YOU’VE GOT
Before the world stopped with the pandemic I was on a scary, self-destructive path and had reached my lowest personal low. The pandemic gave me time to sit with myself and look at all the ugliness and damage I had done. It also helped me see that I was more than what I’d been through, that by really sitting with, and dealing with, the darkest parts, I could see the light that I was covering up all along. This indescribable thing that I now protect and nurture with my life.
The idea for Let It Shine was born while I was on my 6am morning walk. The slow, steady sunrise made me imagine the idea of my inner light becoming un-clipped and expanding until it overtook the world and pervaded the universe. It sounded like a gospel vamp that never stopped adding layers, and constantly changed scale, like a fractal. At one point there are over 60 individual vocal lines stacked on top of a synthesized orchestra, live sax band, Philip Glass inspired arpeggios and R&B 808s. I know I looked quite crazy head-banging down the street in rural North Carolina with my eyes closed. I couldn’t contain the joy of feeling that survival and personal change were possible.
EPILOGUE
= THE WOMAN OF MY FAMILY
+ MAHOGANY L. BROWNE
+ WE’VE STILL GOT WORK TO DO
So we’ve died, been reborn, committed that new life to calling out the problems of the world, found an answer in the anthem of a people who know survival and rejoiced in the amplification of that intangible spark that makes the possibility of hope shine. Can we ride into the sunset now? The poet Mahogany L. Browne thinks otherwise. For the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s annual Americana concert at the Hollywood Bowl, I made a piece called Concerto No 2: ANTHEM that turns The Star-Spangled Banner into the Black National Anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing as a means of questioning America’s foundational ideals and presenting a worthy alternative. I invited Mahogany to be the one to do the questioning. For this document of her questioning, I invited three generations of women in my family to join her voice in the proposition: ‘Who said the free? Can’t be me.’ Though we may reach personal victories within the moral arc of the universe, we still have a long, long, long way to go.
OLD MAN RIVER
= SHOWTUNE
+ BLACK TEHNO FOLKLORE
+ TRADING PAST FOR PRESENT
Old Man River, the song that made Robeson famous. The showtune that began as a minstrel song, but post-suicide attempt became a war cry; a transition from an old way to a new, self-actualised way. This transition is incarnate through Robeson's decision to change the lyrics to the song between the original 1927 version, and his Carnegie Hall recital 31 years later in 1958. We go from ‘get a little drunk, and you land in jail’ to ‘show a little grit, and you land in jail’ – from ‘I get weary and sick of trying, I’m tired of living and scared of dying’ to ‘But I keep laughing instead of crying, I must keep fighting until I’m dying.’
The arrangement uses a synth track inspired by the black, queer, Detroit-techno duo Drexia. All of their work stems from the incredible myth of the middle passage where pregnant women were thrown overboard and their babies became mer-people that served as beacons of hope for an alternate future for Black people. We call on the sound of this duo to represent ancestors calling Robeson, or myself, or all people to free themselves from conscripted paths. It’s a call to see the old paths of the river and stem its flow towards what could be.
Artist Biographies
Davóne Tines bass-baritone, concept
Davóne Tines is a mould-breaking artist whose work encompasses a diverse repertoire, ranging from early music to new commissions by leading composers, while exploring the social issues of today. He is a creator, curator and performer at the intersection of many histories, cultures and aesthetics. As such, he is engaged in work that blends opera, art song, spirituals, contemporary classical, gospel and protest songs as a means to tell a deeply personal story of perseverance connecting to all of humanity.
He is an artist who takes full agency of his work, often devising new programmes and pieces from conception to performance. He has premiered numerous operas by today’s leading composers, including John Adams, Terence Blanchard and Matthew Aucoin; and his concert appearances include performances of works ranging from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire. He recently made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera New York, performing in John Adams’s El Niño. His first studio album, ROBESOИ, released on Nonesuch Records last September, explores his connection to legendary American baritone Paul Robeson, reimagining some of the music Robeson famously sang.
Davóne Tines is Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Artist-in-Residence and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale’s first-ever Creative Partner. He was Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year in 2022, a winner of the 2020 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, a recipient of the 2018 Emerging Artists Award from Lincoln Center and a recipient of the 2024 Chanel Next Prize. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School and Harvard University.
Khari Lucas electric bass, sound artist
Khari Lucas is a composer and songwriter from Charleston, South Carolina. His work explores various themes across the traditions of Black music and artistic expression.
John Bitoy piano
John Bitoy is a versatile composer, pianist and artistic director from Chicago, Illinois. His work as an artist and producer is multi-disciplinary and spans genres from jazz to classical, drawing inspiration from diverse global traditions. He earned his Master’s degree in Piano Performance from DePaul University and he is artistic director of The Second Floor, a black-owned performance and events space on the West Side of Chicago. His focus as an artist and organiser is on bringing sounds and stories of black resistance from the African Diaspora to audiences at home and internationally.
