The Langston Hughes Project – Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz, a masterwork written in twelve-parts by Hughes in the early 1960s. This production is brought to life in a multimedia production is Langston Hughes at his best: insightful, wise, poignant, funny and soulful. On stage the audience experiences the mood of the Harlem Renaissance in this 800-line suite of poems illustrated by the spoken word, accompanied the Ron McCurdy Quartet and Hughes’ poetry performed by Emmy-nominated actor and director Malcolm-Jamal Warner.
The work is described as a multimedia performance involving spoken word artist, jazz quartet and a slide presentation of images from the Harlem Renaissance. All of these components occur simultaneously. This multimedia presentation recreates Hughes’s vision of the global struggle for freedom in the early 1960’s. African American artists and photographers including Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, and Romare Bearden link words and music to a kaleidoscopic collection of images. Music director and composer Ron McCurdy orchestrates the original musical based on the music cues suggested by Langston Hughes. You can see this exciting performance in South Florida on February 23. Visit here for tickets and details.
Here is a clip of the show:
