INFORMATION FOR
The Langston Hughes Project, a multimedia virtual concert performance of American author Langston Hughes’s kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, will be presented online on Wednesday, March 3, 2021 at 8 p.m. as part of William Paterson University’s WP Presents! Virtual Wednesdays series.
The Langston Hughes Project focuses on the poet’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. Published in 1961, the poem is Hughes’s homage in verse and music to the struggle for artistic and social freedom at home and abroad at the beginning of the 1960s. The 12-part epic poem— which Hughes scored with musical cues drawn from blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, bebop and progressive jazz, Latin cha cha and Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming—is a creative masterwork that was left unperformed at his death in 1967.
This multimedia celebration of Hughes’s masterwork—in music, spoken word, and visuals—is performed by Dr. Ron McCurdy, professor of music at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, as narrator and on trumpet, and his talented group of musicians on piano, bass and drums. McCurdy served for six years as chair of the jazz studies department at USC, as a consultant to the Grammy Foundation educational programs, and is past president of the International Association for Jazz Education.
This production was named "Live Experience of the Year" at the 2016 JazzFM Awards in London, England.
Tickets are “pay what you choose” at $10, $15, $20, $25 and $30. Tickets must be purchased in advance. For additional information, call the Shea Center for Performing Arts Box Office at 973-720-2371 or visit wp-presents.org.
