Jazz Montage: A
Multimedia Concert Performance of Langston Hughes's
Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz
The Langston Hughes Project is a multimedia concert performance
of Langston Hughes's kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite. Ask Your Mama
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. It is a twelve-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 -- a creative masterwork
left unperformed at his death.
Jazz was a cosmopolitan metaphor for Langston Hughes, a force
for cultural convergence beyond the reach of words, or the limits
of any one language. It called up visual analogues for him as
well, most pointedly the surrealistic techniques of painterly
collage and of the film editing developed in this country in the
1930s and 40s, which condensed time and space, conveyed to the
viewer a great array of information in short compass, and which
offered the possibility of suggesting expanded states of consciousness,
chaotic remembrances of past events or dreams -- through montage.
"To me," Hughes wrote, "jazz is a montage of a
dream deferred. A great big dream -- yet to come -- and always
yet to become ultimately and finally true."
By way of videography, this concert performance links the words
and music of Hughes' poetry to topical images of Ask Your Mama's
people, places, and events, and to the works of the visual artists
Langston Hughes admired or collaborated with most closely over
the course of his career -- 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 and the rhythmic sculptural figurines and heads and bas
reliefs of Richmond Barthe, 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 our 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 1960s.
Ask Your Mama was dedicated to Louis Armstrong, "the greatest
horn blower of them all," and to those of whatever hue or
culture of origin who welcomed being immersed in the mysteries,
rituals, names, and nuances of black life not just in America
but in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in Europe and Africa during
the years of anti-colonial upheaval abroad and the rising Freedom
Movement here at home. Not only the youthful Martin Luther King,
Jr. but the independence leaders of Guinea and Nigeria and Ghana
and Kenya and the Congo fill the chants and refrains of Hughes's
epic poem.
Originally, Langston 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, Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross, Otis Spann, Ray
Charles, and Muddy Waters. The musical scoring of the poem was
designed to serve not as mere background for the words 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 full performance of his masterwork, it remained
only in the planning stages when Langston Hughes died in 1967.
Its recovery now in word, music, and image provides a galvanizing
experience for audiences everywhere.
For further information, please contact:
Ronald McCurdy
P.O. Box 3612, So. Pasadena, CA 91031
(818) 429-2494
E-mail: ronmccbop@aol.com
