This show is part of our Performing Arts Series. To purchase a subscription package, please follow this link: https://www.center.iastate.edu/subscriptions/.
The Langston Hughes Project is a multimedia concert performance of Langston Hughes’s kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite, “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz” (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 AfroCuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso and African drumming—a creative masterwork left unperformed at his death.
The Langston Hughes Project is a joyous Multimedia celebration of this masterwork—in music, spoken word and visuals— performed by the impressively versatile Dr. Ron McCurdy and his talented group of musicians.
