Song in His Heart Is Louder Than Despair

He speaks in a whisper, each word drawn painfully from his damaged vocal cords. The effort is all the more anguished because once his voice rose with arias from a dozen operas. Once he had a future bright with promise. But now?

Jason Black explores the question as though it’s a viable presence in the room. Then, after a long pause, he whispers, “I don’t know.”

At age 25, he’s looking toward days clouded with uncertainty. The tenor voice that fills my room as I write, Black’s voice on a CD, may never again be heard in person on an opera stage.

He knows that, but the prospect is never tolerable. “I can’t imagine life without singing,” he says, forcing out each word. “But it’s no longer in my hands.”

We sit in the living room of the Winnetka home that he and his wife, Tausha, a music teacher, purchased just before an accident two months ago that changed his life. Whether or not they’ll be able to keep it now is problematical.

Without medical insurance and burdened by bills, Black knows that future treatment of his injured vocal cords is uncertain. Nothing is clear anymore. For the second time in his life, Jason Black is walking in fate’s shadow.

The accident that left a red scar down the right side of his neck occurred as he was moving from a Toluca Lake townhouse to his present home. Two friends were helping him move a large, heavy glass coffee table out the front door. They dropped it three times. Twice, it didn’t break. The third time, it did.

“A solid piece of glass came at me like a guillotine,” Black says. “It cut me from behind the ear to the voice box, through both jugular veins.”

He pressed a towel against the wound to stem a heavy flow of blood until paramedics arrived and rushed him to Cedars-Sinai hospital. Weak but conscious, he told the surgeon he was an opera singer, and somehow managed to sing part of an aria from Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”

He whistles “La Donna e Mobile” for me as we sit in the living room of his home, tucked into a quiet corner of a cul-de-sac. Though his voice is a hushed whisper, the whistle is a high, strong, almost electronic sound, piercing the silence with unnerving clarity.

“I don’t know what the quality of my voice, the timbre, was when I sang it to the surgeon,” he says, sensing the oddity of the moment. “I don’t think I finished. People were doing things to me. I was angry.”

The aria reminds Black of the first time fate’s shadow fell over him. He was singing in “Rigoletto” for the San Jose opera three years ago when he was involved in an automobile accident. Bones in his arms and legs were broken, and he suffered brain damage.

He was told then, he says, that he should have died. When he survived, doctors said he would never walk again and that his brain would take at least two years to heal.

“It took two weeks,” Black whispers as I lean forward to hear the triumph in his tone. “After the accident, I was the lead tenor in ‘Rigoletto,’ ‘Madame Butterfly’ and ‘Candide.’” He smiles in spite of himself.

“I just wouldn’t die.”

Music has dominated his life. He began singing in childhood, at home and in church, and by the time he was an undergraduate at San Jose State University, he was performing in operas.

Since then, Black has sung in 25 productions throughout California and once in Germany, both as a lead tenor and a member of the chorus.

When the accident that damaged his vocal cords occurred, he was performing with the Orange County Opera, taking classical music into schools and preparing for a part in the L.A. Opera presentation of Puccini’s “Turandot.”

Steven Dunham, who heads the Orange County group, speaks of the bright future that was Black’s, adding sadly, “That’s why all of this is so much more tragic.”

Black’s “day job” was as a singing waiter at Miceli’s Restaurant in Universal City. I heard of him from co-workers who were in awe of his voice and devastated by the accident that reduced his soaring vibrato to a whisper.

Fate toys with Black. Because he and his wife couldn’t afford medical insurance for both of them, they purchased it only for her. They must now personally bear the costs of his surgery and subsequent treatment, which have already exceeded $100,000.

He was told by a surgeon that he would probably get his voice back, that the damage to his voice box was caused by swelling that would eventually subside. But a specialist told him not to hold out hope that he would ever sing again.

“Who do you believe?” he asks in an anguished whisper.

Weeks of therapy and treatment lie ahead: a vocal strobe test, therapy three times a week, a neurological study and perhaps even more surgery if he is ever to sing again.

Black is hopeful. He has to be. “Music is all I have,” he says.

I listen now as his voice, rich and vibrant, fills my office. The aria plays over and over on the same CD. I can almost hear fate whispering in the background.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He is at *

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al.martinez@latimes.com