Monday, March 31, 2008

Langston Hughes Peformance at WSU

Wichita State University is hosting a performance of a "Ask Your Mama" Langston Hughes project this Wednesday. It sounds like it'll be worth catching.

The Langston Hughes Project "Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz" is a College of Fine Arts Connoisseur Series bonus event with the WSU Office of Multicultural Affairs as co-sponsor.

"Ask Your Mama" will open at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 2, in Miller Concert Hall.
Langston Hughes

Its mood is set in an 800-line suite of poems written by Hughes in the 1960s that reflect the writer's vision of the global struggle for freedom during the early years of the decade.

Illustrated by voice and accompanied by music from the nationally known McCurdy/Wright Consort, it will be lit up by on-screen visual illustrations of Hughes' Harlem Renaissance world by such collaborators and contemporaries as Gordon Parks, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden.

I don't expect to to sound as great as the commercials on KMUW which feature some stirring Charles Mingus. Sounds to me like it is from Blues and Roots, the first Mingus LP I ever bought and one of his finest. Mingus did collaborate with Hughes on The Weary Blues, so it's not totally inappropriate.

Still, Hughes is one of the great American poets, so it should be a good show.

No comments: