ROBESON with Davóne Tines and The Truth

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.

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.