Program Description

Langston Hughes: Words, Jazz, and Justice is a multimedia concert performance of Langston Hughes’ kaleidoscopic jazz-poem suite featuring a jazz quartet, spoken-word, and images from the Harlem Renaissance. “Ask Your Mama” 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 that 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 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 people, places, and events, and to the works of the visual artists 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 Hughes died in 1967. Its recovery now in word, music, and image provides a galvanizing experience for audiences everywhere.

PROGRAM NOTES

Hesitation Blues  –  WC Handy

Mood 1- C U L T U R A L  E X C H A N G E
In Negro sections of the South where doors have no resistance to violence, danger always whispers harshly.  Klansmen cavort, and havoc may come at any time.  Negroes often live either by the river or the railroad, and for most there is not much chance of going anywhere else.  Yet always one of them has been away and has come home.  The door has opened to admit something strange and foreign, yet tied by destiny to a regional past nourished by a way of life in common–in this case collard greens.

A State Department visitor from Africa comes, wishing to meet Negroes.  He is baffled by the “two sides to every question” way of looking at things in the South.  Although he finds that in the American social supermarket blacks for sale range from intellectuals to entertainers, to the African all cellophane signs point to ideas of change–in an IBM land that pays more attention to Moscow than to Mississippi.  What–wonders the African–is really happening in the shadow of world events, past and present–and of world problems, old and new–to an America that seems to understand so little about its black citizens?

Afronato (Interlude) – Ron McCurdy/Eli Brueggemann

Mood 2- R I D E, R E D, R I D E
In the restless Caribbean there are the same shadows as in Mississippi, where, according to Time, Leontyne comes in the back door. Yet some persons in high places in Washington consider it subversive for ordinary people to be concerned with problems such as back doors anywhere–even suspecting those citizens of color who legitimately use the ballot in the North to elect representatives to front doors. But in spite of all, some Negroes occasionally do manage–for a moment–to get a brief ride in somebody’s American chariot.

Mood 3- S H A D E S  O F  P I G M E A T
Oppression by any other name is just about the same, casts a long shadow, adds a dash of bitters to each song, makes of almost every answer a question, and of men of every race or religion questioners.