Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country
Founded 05-05-05
March 22, 2007 issue
The Langston Hughes Project “Ask Your Mama” Twelve Moods of Jazz March 26
Story by Ron Fitzwater
The Langston Hughes Project, a multimedia concert performance of Hughes’s kaleidoscope poem suite, “Ask Your Mama” will be presented at ASU’s Rosen Concert Hall on Monday, March 26, at 8:00p.m.
Hughes is considered one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the primary leaders of the African American artistic movement in the 1920s. Hughes's creative genius was influenced by life in New York City's Harlem and helped shape American literature and politics. Through poetry, novels, plays, essays and children's books, Hughes promoted equality, condemned racism and injustice, and celebrated African American culture, humor and spirituality.
The March 26 performance will feature a jazz quartet along with spoken word and images from the Harlem Renaissance, with special focus on Hughes’s work “Ask Your Mama.”
Dr. Ronald C. McCurdy, chair of the jazz department and professor of music in the Thornton School of Music at the University of California, orchestrated the original musical based on the cues Hughes suggested.
McCurdy describes the event as “Hughes at his best: insightful, wise, poignant, funny and soulful. The audience will experience the feel of the Harlem Renaissance.”
The 800-line suite of poems is illustrated by African American artists and photographers Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks and Romare Bearden, who link words and music to a kaleidoscopic collection of images, that McCurdy describes as “large as life visual illustrations” of Hughes' world.
Admission is free to the public, on a first come, first served basis.
Want To Go?
Date: Monday, March 26
Time: 8:00p.m.
Location: Rosen Concert Hall, ASU
Cost: Free to the public, on a first come, first served basis.