Davóne Tines & Ruckus: What Is Your Hand in This?

I went to operatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines' performance at Herbst Theatre on Saturday evening expecting an ascetic art song recital and was instead happily astonished by a brilliantly conceived concert that included a seven-piece band and a huge amateur chorus. The San Francisco Performances show was entitled How is Your Hand in This? and it often felt like a distilled, 80-minute version of Taylor Mac's 24-hour extravaganza, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.

Tines is an interesting artist who was one of the major highlights of the 2017 SF Opera world premiere production of the John Adams opera Girls of the Golden West. Playing the escaped slave Ned Peters, he sang the aria What to a Slave is the Fourth of July? taken from the famous speech by Frederick Douglass. Besides appearing in other mostly contemporary operas, Tines composes and creates thematic musical programs of his own, including a Paul Robeson tribute that has been touring the world. Robeson could and did sing everything from Jerome Kern to Mussorgsky, and the same seems to be true of Davóne Tines.

His collaborators for the evening included the Julliard professor/poet/composer/bassist Douglas Balliett (with the frizzy hair above), who composed and created most of the musical arrangements for the show, and played electric bass. (Also pictured are Paul Holmes Morton on guitar and Clay Zeller-Townson on winds and percussion.) The band is part of a New York City group called Ruckus that specializes in lively, reworked arrangements of early music composers such as Handel, who also made his way onto this program as a foundational inspiration for many of the gospel tinged songs. At first, it was a disappointment that Tines and the band were amplified since Herbst Theatre is on the small side and Tines's voice is capable of filling the Metropolitan Opera House, but the sound mix was good and it allowed for Tines to speak and croon softly. When opera singers try to cross over into popular songs, it usually doesn't work well but Tines seems to have no difficulty singing in a multitude of styles.

In each of its stops on the show's national tour, which is celebrating and examining this nation's 250th anniversary, they have invited a local amateur chorus to join them. In San Francisco it was the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts Concert Choir, led by Michael Desnoyers. They were fabulous, especially in an improvisatory, aleatory account of Julius Eastman's Buddha led by Tines.

Elsewhere they helped to provide the sensation of being at a congregational church where everyone in the pews knows someone in the chorus. Tines also had the audience join in as the congregation with the title song, What is Your Hand in This?, composed by Tines himself and arranged by Baillett, It is very much a call-and-response gospel sermon that's probing in its simplicity. What is my hand in this? / While you listen to this song, / Will you try to right your wrong, asking, / What is my hand in this?

The program notes explain: "America's music at the founding of the country was the music of dissent. We celebrate this tradition." Early in the show Tines introduced The Liberty Song from 1770 by John Dickinson, which contains the lyrics: In Freedom we're born and in Freedom we'll live. / Our purses are ready. Steady, friends, steady. Not as slaves, but as Freemen our money we'll give.

The irony, Tines noted in his narration, is that Dickinson actually owned slaves when writing The Liberty Song. Attending this concert and watching the Bad Bunny Super Bowl event the following afternoon were similar, powerful cultural events. Without hammering obvious political points, both shows were profoundly political, complex, and hopeful, amazing feats while a racist madman currently steers our unsteady ship of state.