The Dillard Center for the Arts and the Old Dillard Museum present a musical tribute to the legendary poet, Langston Hughes, featuring the Ron McCurdy Quartet. The concert is part of the Cannonball Jazz Series and takes place during National Poetry Month at Dillard High School Auditorium, 2501 NW 11 Street, Fort Lauderdale FL 33311 on April 10, 2016 at 4 p.m.
Known as the Langston Hughes Project, the event is a multimedia concert performance of Langston Hughes’ kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite titled, Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz. This is Hughes’ homage in verse and music to the struggle for artistic and social freedom at home and abroad at the beginning of the 1960s. It is a twelve-part epic poem which Hughes scored with musical cues drawn from blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, bebop, progressive jazz, Latin “cha cha,” Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming – a creative masterwork left unperformed at his death.
Originally, Hughes created “Ask Your Mama” in the aftermath of his participation as an official for the five-day Newport Jazz Festival of July 1960, where he shared the stage with such luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Horace Silver, Dakota Staton, Oscar Peterson, Otis Spann, Ray Charles, and Muddy Waters. The musical scoring was designed to serve not as mere background but to forge a conversation and a commentary with the music. Though Hughes originally intended to collaborate with Charles Mingus, and then Randy Weston, on the performance of this masterwork, it remained only in the planning stages when Langston Hughes dies in 1967. Its recovery now in word, music and image provides a galvanizing experience for audiences everywhere.
Utilizing engaging videography, this concert performance links the words and music of Hughes’ poetry to topical images of Ask Your Mama’s people, places, events and to the visual artists Langston Hughes admired and/or collaborated with most closely over the course of his career. These included the African-inspired mural designs and cubist geometries of Aaron Douglas, the blues and jazz-inspired collages of Romare Bearden, the macabre grotesques of Meta Warrick Fuller, the rhythmic sculptural figurines, heads, and bas reliefs of Richmond Barthe, and the color-blocked cityscapes and black history series of Palmer Hayden and Jacob Lawrence. Together the words, sounds and images recreate a magical moment in cultural history, which bridges the Harlem renaissance, the post World War II beat writers’ coffeehouse jazz poetry world and the looming Black Arts performance explosion of the 1960’s.
The performance is brought to life by the extraordinary talents of the Ron McCurdy Quartet. Dr. Ronald C. McCurdy is the director of the National Grammy Vocal Jazz Ensemble and combo, serves as Director of the Walt Disney All-American College Band in Anaheim, California and is professor of music in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California (USC). He is Past-President of the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE) and prior to his appointment at USC, he served as Director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at USC. He has released two CDs. The first one entitled, “Once Again for the First Time” on the INNOVA label and the most recent CD titled “April in Paris” with his vocal funk group, The Ron McCurdy Collective. He is co-author of a vocal jazz improvisation series entitled “Approaching the Standards”, published by Warner Bros.
Dr. McCurdy has performed with a host of legendary jazz artists, including Wynton Marsalis, Joe Williams, Rosemary Clooney, Terence Blanchard, Leslie Uggams, Arturo Sandoval, Diane Schuur, Ramsey Lewis, Mercer Ellington, Dr. Billy Taylor, Maynard Ferguson, Lionel Hampton, and Dianne Reeves. He is a performing artist for the Yamaha International Corporation.
Donation for admission is $20 for adults and $10 for students. For seat reservations call 754-322-8828, go to our website at www.olddillardmuseum.org or visit the Old Dillard Museum at 1009 NW 4th Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33311.
