Overview

The Langston Hughes Project is a joyous multimedia concert performance in music, spoken word and visuals of Langston Hughes’ kaleidoscopic jazz poem “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,” Hughes’ homage to the struggle for artistic and social freedom at home and abroad at the beginning of the 1960s. The impressively versatile Dr. Ron McCurdy (as narrator and on trumpet), his talented group of musicians (on piano, bass and drums) and a special surprise celebrity guest perform the twelve-part epic poem that Hughes’ scored with musical cues drawn from blues and Dixieland, gospel, boogie woogie, bebop and progressive jazz, Latin “cha-cha” and Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso and African drumming—a creative masterwork left unperformed at his death.