ROBESOИ

America’s Congress for Cultural Freedom spent mountains of US federal cash to ensure that American culture remained free from communism. The organization, launched in 1950 under the wing of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), fed a climate of anti-Soviet paranoia that did lasting harm to countless left-leaning creative artists, performers, and intellectuals. Paul Robeson was among those caught in the crosshairs of the Cold War culture wars. The undying power of his achievements as singer, scholar, stage and film actor, and campaigner for Black and minority rights surge through ROBESOИ, an all-encompassing artwork from bass-baritone Davóne Tines and his aptly titled band The Truth. ROBESOИ confronts the dark heart of America’s contemporary politics. It opens with a harrowing recollection of Robeson’s suicide attempt, undertaken in a Moscow hotel room in 1961. Davóne Tines is convinced that Robeson experienced a breakdown after being poisoned with the psychedelic drug LSD, among the CIA’s preferred substances for upending the minds of perceived enemies. Although Robeson survived, his mental and physical health were severely compromised by his encounter with psychosis. ROBESOИ weaves strands of the singer’s biography together with memories of what Tines calls his own “lowest personal low,” reverberant echoes of African American defiance against oppression and endemic prejudice, and thunderous condemnation of those determined to stand in the way of racial and socio-economic equality. “Ever since I was a young bass-baritone, people would say, ‘You sound like Paul Robeson,’ and ask if I sang ‘Old Man River,’” Davóne Tines tells Apple Music Classical. “I didn’t know what ‘Old Man River’ was then. I’d heard of Paul Robeson but didn’t know much about who he really was. I knew he was a great singer, that he was in Showboat and there was activism involved, just the most basic idea.” His first studio album evolved from a discussion about the singer with his close friend, the opera and theatre director Zack Winokur. The story of Robeson’s role in the long, painful journey of African Americans out of slavery and segregation resonated with Tines, himself a dedicated smasher of stereotypes, an opera singer at home in a multitude of other genres, gospel, R&B, jazz, and art song among them. Tines’ knowledge of Robeson deepened with help from Winokur and the playwright and producer Ed Wasserman, who jointly shaped the album’s theatrical structure; percussionist and dramaturg Ian Askew, meanwhile, proved invaluable in developing its musical content. ROBESOИ takes the imaginary form of the poisoned singer’s fever dream, populated by ghosts of America’s past and present and filled with the songs he brought to the masses. There’s room in the tracklist for “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific; J.S. Bach’s chorale Christ lag in Todesbanden, which Robeson sang in recital at New York’s Carnegie Hall; “Lift Every Voice,” America’s Black national anthem; and an impassioned version of the spiritual “Scandalize My Name,” propelled by a fizzing tambourine rhythm taken from Julius Eastman’s Stay On It. The album also includes “Fly Away,” a wild one-take improvisation for voice, piano, and percussion, built around “Le gibet” from Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, and closes with “Old Man River” as it’s never sounded before. “Making this album gave a chance for me to do what I really wanted to do on my own terms,” Davóne Tines recalls. “It became a space where I could plumb my imagination and find things I’ve been wanting to say, but haven’t had spaces to say them, and pull on parts of myself that I know personally have always been there, but which I’d never had the opportunity to show all together. And then it was about realizing the breadth of worlds and aesthetics and histories that are all woven up. So it was deeply exhilarating and liberating to have the space to be every single inch of myself in one project, which leads to some crazy things!”