Trio offers a change of tenor

music

In the long history of opera little has changed. After 400 years, the tenor still rules.While opera's leading ladies of the last decades - Maria Callas, Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, et al,- were known to incite diva worship just short of hysteria, historically it has been the men who have held forth as the preeminent masters of the art.

Ages ago, the castrati, men surgically altered to project feminine voices from masculine lungs, were all the rage. In the early 20th century, the dulcet tones of Enrico Caruso caused an epidemic of swooning until his death in 1921. More recently The Three Tenors (Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Cameras), who sell out stadiums built for baseball and soccer fans, have pushed the audience size for opera concerts to new highs.

Such success has prompted worldwide tenor fever and unleashed a parade of treble-voiced male artists: the Irish Tenors serve up traditional Celtic fare while Andrea Bocelli's fans lavish such rock-- idol adulation on him that one could rename his music pop'era. That Three Mo' Tenors have emerged - three Black men with stentorian, brilliantly honed classical voices, and deep roots in gospel, jazz, Negro spirituals and rhythm and blues -- seems, in hindsight, inevitable.

And while Three Mo' Tenors stars Thomas Young, Rodrick Dixon and Victor Trent Cook have yet to fill a soccer stadium, they have, in short order, released their first compact disc on RCA Victor (under a contract that includes an option for four more), produced a well-reviewed PBS special available on VHS videocassette and DVD, toured more than 25 cities and taught the world that there is more to singing tenor than normally meets the ear.

The three conservatory-trained artists audaciously defy the rules of repertoire, offering a remarkable range of singing styles in one show. In a two-hour concert, the seamless shifts from one century or genre to another leave little time for boredom; eighteenth-century classics segue to jazz, jazz dovetails into blues, blues soars into gospel. Broadway, spirituals and Motown soul intermingle throughout and complete the mix.

To be certain, crossover is not new. The Three Tenors and nearly every other popular opera artist on the planet have paired their voices with pop, rock and jazz stars engendering results that are lucrative, if not stylistically convincing. But while Three Mo' Tenors cross over so often in a single night as to leave their audiences dizzy with admiration, the equilibrium never falters. It's this ability that sets Three Mo' Tenors apart from the pack.

For example, in their PBS concert, the formally attired trio struck a proper Verdian pose for "La Donna e Mobile" from Rigoletto. But the final cadence was still ringing when, shoulders swaggering and fingers poised to snap, they launched into a street-savvy "Let the Good Times Roll." And roll it did, as Verdi stood toe to toe with the blues.

"This is unprecedented," says Marion J. Caffey, the Broadway producer who conceived and created the Three Mo' Tenors show.

"There have never been three people singing seven styles that cover 400 years in one night. We want to educate the public that, yes, African American tenors can sing opera. That's the first lesson."

The next lesson, he offers, is that they can also sing everything else. Caffey notes a "quiet absence" of African American tenors on the world stages that has nothing to do with a lack of available talent. (The sexual politics of opera - where the lead tenor "gets the girl" - makes employment a challenge for the Black tenor.)

"Adaptability is born out of necessity," he says. "[Black tenors have] had to adapt, and the fact that [they] can adapt is the phenomenon."

While the Three Mo' show may change mood at the drop of a hat - literally - the result is no mere "hat trick." Counter tenor Victor Trent Cook seems just as comfortable in Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" beneath the wide brim of a black Fedora as he is behind the innocent veil of Scarlatti, and when the trio don oversized "apple" caps for "The Jazz Cat," they are nothing less than a crew of hipsters out on the prowl.

"It doesn't matter how many things we do, what matters is that we do them well," says lyric tenor Thomas Young. "Versatility in and of itself is meaningless unless you honor each genre you sing."

It was Young's peerless versatility that gave birth to the Three Mo' Tenors concept more than 10 years ago. Then, between making the circuit of opera companies and concert work, Young was performing in a show called Standup Shakespeare at the West Bank Cafe in the heart of New York's Hell's Kitchen, a few blocks from Broadway. With a small stage and cabaret seating, the tony restaurant/theater welcomed upstart and seasoned artists set on fine-tuning their craft.

The show featured artists in a pastiche of musical styles.

"Thomas Young is an incredible talent," says Steve Olsen, owner of the West Bank Cafe.

"He did art songs, chamber music, jazz, blues, everything. It was the first time I'd ever heard an operatic voice without pretension."

Caffey, a Florida-born "song-anddance" man turned Broadway "gypsy" who'd stopped in to see the show, was equally impressed.

"When I heard Tom, it changed my life as far as my understanding of singing was concerned. I waited for him afterward and told him, 'I owe you $93. I only paid $7 to get in to see you, and there's no way I should have paid less than a hundred."'

The two became friends, and Caffey audaciously promised Young that someday they would work together as producer/director and artist.

Years passed, and Young continued his work performing at American and European opera houses (New York City Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago and London's Covent Garden among them), creating roles in such contemporary works as X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, Amistad and The Death of Klinghoffer, and on occasion tapping the rich roots of jazz, rhythm and blues, and spirituals planted during his childhood in Cleveland in the 1960s.

And Caffey was in transit from performer to producer, creating his first Broadway show, Street Corner Symphony, a melange of popular rhythm and blues songs from the 1960s and '70s.

While New York critics "hated" Caffey's first outing, all admitted the talent was exceptional, and among the stellar voices in his show was that of Victor Trent Cook. Caffey enlisted both Cook and Young to give shape to his idea; a showcase vehicle for a trio of Black tenors. To round out the group, Cook suggested Rodrick Dixon, with whom he'd sung in the Brooklyn Boys Choir, and Three Mo' Tenors was born.

Caffey also enlisted the help of pianist/composer/arranger Joseph Joubert, who, like the tenors, adapted easily to a multiplicity of styles. The first day in the studio was a revelation to all.

"Within minutes we knew we had something special," says Cook, a former boy soprano who attended New York's High School of Music and Art and was a Star Search grand prize winner. With a four/plus-octave range (countertenors typically soar into the soprano register) Cook caps off the harmonic top end when the voices combine.

Native New Yorker Dixon, a full-bodied lyric with a tone of burnished gold, grew up the son of a minister who had an "unbelievable voice," and also attended the High School of Music and Art before going on to the Mannes College of Music in New York. (Residing in Chicago with his wife, singer Alfreda Burke, and two children, Dixon has sung with opera companies in Portland, Ore., and Columbus, Ohio, as well as Lyric Opera of Chicago.)

Getting to know each other, discovering individual strengths and playing off each other's special talents to define and distribute roles, the trio quickly developed a unique chemistry.

"At the first workshop, we knew that we had the intellect and skill, that as a collective body we knew what was going on," says Dixon of the trio's beginnings in August 2000.

"We didn't even have to discuss it. We spoke an unwritten language, communicating from sound."

Each part of the puzzle fell into place; Joubert turned out tasteful arrangements, Caffey engineered stage direction. Dixon and Cook deferred to the veteran Young, the unofficial jazz master of the trio, who led the way in the technique of riffing and scatting (with a nod to his idols Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and Carmen McRae), and brought a wizened philosophy and understanding of the art form to the table.

But while his devotion to jazz shows in such works as "Twisted," it is the Puccini masterpiece, "Nessun Dorma" where Young's art shines. In his hands, the lover Calaf's plea is by turns plaintive and powerful with a pathos to move the stoniest heart.

Dixon is equally versatile; his dark, velvet-textured lines in "A Song for You" recall the poignant, haunting phrase turns of Donny Hathaway, while in Gaetano Donizetti's tour de force "Ah! Mes Amis," his voice is a brilliant gem, striking nine high C's with formidable power, bell-like clarity and certainty of pitch.

If countertenors are rare, rarer still are the extremities of range, dynamics, pitch and coloring possessed by Cook.

Such a unique gift can be a mixed blessing, says Cook, who left college out of frustration.

"They didn't know what to do with me," he recalls, and work in the countertenor repertory of the likes of Handel and Henry Purcell was difficult to find.

In Three Mo' Tenors, Cook puts on the character of Cab Calloway as easily as the Zoot suit he wears, his voice a heraldic trumpet. Remarkably, he can also deliver an incandescent rendition of Alessandro Scarlatti's "O'Cessate Di Piagarmi," full of childlike purity and wonderment.

Perhaps the biggest treat comes when the trio sings in harmony in such gospel pieces as "Let the Praise Begin" and "Just Come." There, tenor dissolves into tenor, voices fusing to produce a wholeness of sound greater than the sum of the parts.

After almost two years, response to Three Mo' Tenors has been extraordinary. Like the self-titled CD, DVD and video, concerts are selling out and their second national tour is underway, with concert dates already filling up the calendar for 2003.

"I think it was Coleman Hawkins who said, 'I like any kind of music unless it's wrong,"' says Young.

"I like to think the people are responding because there is a kind of emotional authenticity and honesty in what we are trying to do. They see that it's all about the music, and they are responding to our dedication and our love for it."

The most exciting aspect of Three Mo' Tenors' appeal may be the diversity of their audiences. With four centuries of music to offer, they bridge every conceivable gap - blues lovers and opera buffs, young and old, middle and working class sit shoulder to shoulder.

"When you watch a really diverse audience watch this show, it's the most amazing thing," Caffey says, remembering an early workshop the tenors did when a group of spirited young Black boys from the Bronx left their seats mid-- way through the concert, rushed the stage and watched the show, eyes wide, grabbing on to the handrails just beyond the footlights.

"They were riveted," Caffey says. "Tears came to my eyes. They even asked if they could come back, and the next show they did the same thing went straight to the handrails. I couldn't have been happier. If we never got to do another concert after that night, it would have been all right with me."

Rosalyn Story is a musician and freelance writer in Dallas.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Mar/Apr 2002
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