Next on "American Black Journal" we'll introduce you to the Michigan Opera Theater's new Artist-in-Residence.

He's a young African American singer who is winning acclaim in the field of classical music.

Plus author Ishmael Reed talks about his book on the life and legacy of Muhammad Ali.

Stay right there, "American Black Journal" starts now.

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♪♪ Welcome to "American Black Journal".

I'm Stephen Henderson, and as always I'm glad you've joined us.

My first guest today has been called one of the most powerful voices of our time by the "Los Angeles Times."

Bass baritone, Davone Tines, is a classically trained singer who has been named Artist-in-Residence at the Michigan Opera Theater.

He's also the winner of the 2020 Sphinx Medal of Excellence which recognizes extraordinary classical musicians of color.

Tines's work is a mixture of opera, gospel, contemporary classical spirituals, and songs of protest.

Here's a performance by Davone followed by my conversation with him.

(bell chimes) (static) (somber music) ♪ Where there is darkness ♪ We'll bring light ♪ Where there is darkness ♪ We'll bring light ♪ Where there is darkness ♪ We will bring the light ♪ Alleluia ♪ Alleluia Davone Tines, congratulations and welcome to "American Black Journal".

Thank you so much.

Good to see you.

So it's exciting to have you here with us in Detroit as a Artist-in-Residence at the Michigan Opera Theater.

Tell us what that means and what you'll be experiencing while you do that.

Completely.

It's a role I'm really excited to take on.

And part of that has to do with the fact that I was invited into a conversation about how to create that role.

And it all began with accepting a different role as Malcolm X and "X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X" by Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis.

And I was deeply excited to, you know, start on the journey of what it means to portray that figure in this city, particularly.

And then it made me think, well what does it actually mean?

What does it mean for me, someone who grew up in Virginia but also travels around the world singing opera to come here and betray of a very Detroit person.

(laughs) I didn't want to just show up and then put on some sort of show without having a larger understanding and connection to the lives and the communities and the histories here.

So I wanted to make it a really critical point of this residency to be about meeting people in the Detroit area from many, many different walks of lives, from many different of modes of working creative and otherwise, in order to see what it meant for MOT, Michigan Opera Theater to interact with the larger Detroit community over time to build real relationships so that when we do this show there's actually a community connection to what's happening.

Yeah.

You know, the relationship between Detroiters and the arts has always been really strong.

And of course we produce lots of great art in many different forms here in Detroit.

I'm not sure everybody thinks of classical music or opera though, when they think about that, right?

I imagine you would like to change that.

Completely.

Something I've been really, really interested in for a long time is trying to figure out what is opera really or what is the greater potential of opera?

And I think part of that has to deal with going back to a deeper root of what opera was and it has to deal with, you know the word opera in Italian means work.

And a part of that definition has to deal with how can you bring together different mediums, different aesthetics, whether that's an orchestra or lighting or the grandiosity of a theater to work to focus on telling a story?

So opera is in essence a really incredible way to tell a story.

And often the stories that people know from opera are not something that people can really connect to.

You know, maybe it's in German, maybe it's telling the story of a people that one doesn't see themselves in.

So I'm trying to make it a priority for people to understand that opera is anything with intentional storytelling.

And I think, especially with this piece "X" it's an opportunity to put a story that isn't normally engaged, a story that I think many people today especially Black people can connect to, and saying this is opera too.

This deserves those resources, this deserves that sort of consideration.

And so I think a way to save or redefine opera is to change what stories and what people are in the middle of it.

Mm, in addition, of course there are not as many African-Americans who work in the classical music space or in the operatic spaces as we'd like.

But tell us how you became interested in this and decided that this is how you wanted to spend your life and express your art.

Definitely.

Well, I grew up in Northern Virginia and singing in the Baptist church there.

My grandfather was a church choir director but also in the Navy for a long time.

And he discovered that I had a unique voice.

One day, he sang kind of jokingly, how are you?

And I said, I am fine.

And they thought, whoa you have (laughs) something else going on there.

And I didn't think that I wanted to sing or have anything to do with it, you know in a professional way.

But he really encouraged me to figure out, you know, what is classical singer?

What is a way of training my voice in order to communicate something.

And then I also played violin for about 14 years and also sang in a lot of the different church contexts, be it the Baptist church or the Greek Orthodox church or even the Catholic Shrine in, in Washington DC.

And what I respond to, I think most in music making, is when it's done for a reason.

And in the church music is always made for a reason.

It's in order to connect to our human and lived experience.

So walking into an operatic context of the classical music world, I never fully saw it for what those stories were or what the content was.

I saw it for its possibility.

I saw, you know, what is it if we can take an orchestra and put it with gospel as people like Kirk Franklin have so brilliantly done.

Or what is it, if we take, you know the grandiosity of the theater and pay homage to stories that we just don't lift up as a society.

So I've always been trying to engage it for the tools.

And I think that also has to deal with a larger tradition of Black people in America taking what's available to us in order to get along and do what we need to do.

And what we need to do right now I think is tell stories that are going to change perspective on how we exist.

Hmm.

When you decided that this was what you wanted to do, was there any hesitation on your part or were there barriers that people throw up in front of you as if to say, well, you know this is not what African Americans do.

This is not what African American men do.

Did you feel like you had to push through a resistance?

I think it was less about a barrier saying you can't do this because you are Black, but I do think there were barriers that were reflexive saying that because you are not white perhaps you don't know how to do this.

And one aspect of that that showed itself was when I was in Conservatory at Julliard.

You're expected to sing, you know, the standard repertoire, Italian songs and Arias and German leit and French ansa, and I was assigned to sing some German songs.

And it was hard for me to get into them because it was just assumed that, you know I would relate to love that way or that I would want to do that through the German language.

I said, I am not a German white, straight man.

I don't experience love or even language this way.

So why is this meant to be the building blocks of the tools through which I'm supposed to express myself?

So it was an acknowledgement even with colleagues continually that, you know, to expect someone to embody identities far from them, it's possible, it's our work as performers or actors, but it also must be acknowledged that there is a removal and a distance there that my white colleagues do not have to partake in that I do.

So it's not to say that it shouldn't be done, but acknowledgement of what people's identity and perspective is as they walk into certain forms is always critical.

Yeah, yeah.

And so let's talk a little more about "X" which is set to hit the stage here in Detroit in 2022, is that right?

Yes.

Malcolm X set to opera, right there, that's a provocative statement.

Tell us what that's been like pulling this all together.

Completely.

So the incredible Anthony Davis, Pulitzer Prize winning composer, and actually his cousin and common collaborator Thulani Davis, I think that they have made a really unique mark in opera in telling Black stories.

Anthony Davis won the Pulitzer for his opera "Central Park Five" and just tackling a number of critical stories in that form.

And as I was saying I think what that form brings is attention and scale.

So a character like Malcolm X deserves that attention and that scale.

And I think the way that they've worked out how this piece exists does that in an incredible and special way.

Anthony writes in a jazz idiom, essentially, but you know, co-mingled with classical which some people would say are, you know different branches of the same tree.

But I think it's gonna be really incredible for audiences to experience what does it mean when you take a full symphonic orchestra with a jazz quartet or a jazz ensemble embedded in the middle and how that kind of expression blasted to that scale all with the purpose of saying, you know this man's life and furthermore his mission, are even beyond the scale of the resources we have available.

Yeah, yeah.

And for you personally, playing this role talk about how that feels.

Completely.

I continue to find that, you know, being a performing artist is a deep blessing and a privilege in order to live out on stage emotions and ways of being that don't necessarily exist or that I wouldn't have the opportunity or venue to express otherwise.

And being a Black man in America, being a Black person or marginalized identity in this country as James Baldwin says, "could fill someone with a sort of madness" And taking on this role, you know, it allows a place to put all of that energy.

Bot to say that Malcolm X is mad, but I think he's often misconstrued as a person who had ill intent or malice.

And one thing I continue to deeply respect in looking into his life and his work was that I think he really just aimed to be a mirror.

He aimed to be a reflecting point of the world and of the time that he lived in.

You know the first aria in the opera titled "You Want the Truth But You Don't Want to Know" talks about how his family and he had been through so much degradation at the hands of white people.

His father being killed, his mother not being able to collect insurance on that hate crime of a death and later being, you know, driven to our own madness and his family being disassembled by a white system that didn't have space for their particular quote unquote problems.

All of what he did was motivated as a reaction, as a reflection of the energy put towards him.

So he said, you know, if my life had been torn asunder at these forces, why shouldn't I have access to those same forces in order to save or continue my life, but even more altruistically the lives of my people.

This year marks the five year anniversary since the death of boxing great and activist, Muhammad Ali.

PBS Books in partnership with the Association For the Study of African American Life and History and the Keiga Foundation recently celebrated the legacy of the World Heavyweight boxing champ by hosting a conversation with author Ishmael Reed.

His book, "The Complete Muhammad Ali" explores the life of the activist and the athlete.

I had the privilege of interviewing Reed for the event.

Here's a portion of our conversation.

I wanna start with just an overview of this wonderful work that you published in 2015 "The Complete Muhammad Ali."

It's a story about Ali that takes a very different arc, I think, than most of the things that I've read or seen about him.

It was a very deliberate arc.

Let's start with you talking about why you wanted to tell this story and why you chose to tell it this way.

Well, Stephen I think that in this country the Black story is told by others.

And so Black opinion and the Black narrative is under a sorta like cultural occupation.

And so I had to go to Montreal to get this book published.

And it was supposed to be published in the United States, but that's another story.

I thought that what I call the Ali scribes, I think mostly privileged white men who control the story about Ali had left out important information.

For example, the great influence that the Nation of Islam played upon his thinking.

So for example, I think that what Muhammad Ali did was the follow the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and sorta like, I don't wanna use the term like parroted or like sorta like repeated the pronounces of Elijah Muhammad.

This part of his story is left out.

And I think that the Nation of Islam is dismissed by what I call the Ali scribes, the people who have a monopoly over his story, because they considered the Nation of Islam to be hatemongers.

And let's talk about that relationship.

I think when you talk about Elijah Muhammad, you talk about the Nation of Islam in popular American culture, the name that comes most to mind, of course is Malcolm X who, you know, is the most recognizable figure I think in the Nation of Islam.

And I think people know a little more about the relationship he had with Elijah Muhammad than the one that Ali had.

But catch us up on what that relationship was like, what it meant to Muhammad Ali both in positive terms and sometimes in negative ones.

Well, Malcolm X who's a black nationalist who actually knew both the Ali and the honorable Elijah Muhammad talks about an incident where he went to Chicago to interview Mohammad Ali and after conferring with the honorable Elijah Muhammad, Ali canceled the interview.

So I think that what shows the influence that Elijah Mohammad had over Ali happened when he broke with Malcolm X. Malcolm X became an international figure and sorta like a television star.

And a friend of mine, one of the people I interviewed named Joe Walker, he and I ran a newspaper in Buffalo, New York, said that when he worked for Muhammad Ali, oh excuse me, Muhammad Speaks, Malcolm X hired him, the people in Chicago felt that he was favoring Malcolm X over Elijah Muhammad.

So Muhammad Ali was caught in that feud and when he did was he chose to follow Elijah Muhammad.

As a matter of fact he mocked Malcolm X when they encountered each other in Africa.

And so relate that relationship, I guess, with Elijah Muhammad and with the Nation of Islam to the activism that we know defined so much of Ali's career.

Of course, you know it's his personality and his strong independence and almost defiance that drives much of that.

But his allegiance to the Nation of Islam also helps frame some of that activism.

Well not participating in the war was policy.

He was not the only follower of the Nation of Islam who took that position.

As a matter of fact, Abdul Rahman, whom I interviewed, was the one who told him to tell the press no Vietnamese ever called me the N word.

I wanna talk about the voices that you incorporate in this book, which are different from a lot of the voices that we've heard before talk about Muhammad Ali.

Talk about the process of gathering those voices and how it helps you render the story in a really different way.

So I began the book in 2003, and I think it was published 2015 or something like that.

So it was a long process, but I was able to interview people who were left out, voices that got left out.

You know I got in a lot of trouble for writing a play called the "Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda."

That's what we do.

We forge the parts of history that are left out of American history.

Look at Tulsa, what happened there, where we uncovered, you know an atrocity or genocide that occurred in 1921.

So we do the left out stuff.

And that led me to interviewing people whose voices were not heard.

For example, I went to a Black nationalist book fair that was organized by Marvin X in San Francisco.

Interviewed Amiri Baraka and a number of other people whose stories about Ali are not told.

And in a related note PBS will air a new Ken Burns documentary about Muhammad Ali this fall.

You can watch the four-part series right here on Detroit Public Television, September 19th through the 22nd.

That's gonna do it for us this week.

Thanks for watching.

You can find out more about our guests at americanblackjournal.org.

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We'll see you next time.