KU Fine Arts offers Langston Hughes finale performance at Lied Center

LAWRENCE -- The poetry of Langston Hughes will come together with jazz and visual images when Ronald McCurdy, former director of the KU Jazz Program, and reader John Wright present The Langston Hughes Project, "Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz," at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 16, at the Lied Center.

Sponsored by the School of Fine Arts and Coca-Cola, the event offers an unofficial finale to the university's Lang-ston Hughes centennial festivities. "Ask Your Mama" is a multimedia concert performance in words, music and images of Langston Hughes' kaleidoscopic jazz poetry suite.

"The School of Fine Arts is delighted to offer this contribution to the Langston Hughes celebration," said Toni-Marie Montgomery, dean of fine arts. "The various elements combine to create an interdisciplinary event that appeals to visual and performing arts patrons as well as scholars."

"Ask Your Mama" is Langston Hughes' homage in verse and music to the struggle for artistic and social freedom at the beginning of the 1960s. Hughes scored the 12-part poem with musical cues drawn from blues, Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, be-bop and progressive jazz, Latin cha-cha, Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso and African drumming.

Multiple image screens during the concert link the words and music of Hughes' poetry to topical images of the poem's people, places and events, and to the works of visual artists Langston Hughes admired or collaborated with over the course of his career.

Images include the African-inspired mural designs and cubist geometries of Aaron Douglas, the blues- and jazz-toned collages of Romare Bearden, the color-blocked cityscapes and black history series of Palmer Hayden and Jacob Lawrence, and the photopoetry of Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava.

Together the words, sounds and images re-create a magical moment in our cultural history, bridging the Harlem Renaissance, the post-World War II Beat writers' coffeehouse world of jazz poetry, and the Black Arts performance explosion of the 1960s.

The creative masterwork had not yet been performed when Hughes died. Wright and McCurdy gave the piece its first fully orchestrated national premiere in 1994. Wright, a professor at the University of Minnesota, delivers the spoken word. McCurdy, a professor at the University of Southern California and president of the International Association of Jazz Educators, leads the ensemble.

Admission for the Langston Hughes Project is $7 general and $5 for students and seniors. Tickets are available at all KU ticket outlets, including the Lied Center, (785) 864-2787.