‘Langston Hughes Project’ at UA Lends Words, Images, Music, Joy to Great Writer’s Life

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods of Jazz—The Langston Hughes Project,” a multimedia presentation featuring Dr. Ron McCurdy, will be at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 23, in The University of Alabama’s Concert Hall at Moody Music Building.

The department of gender and race studies is presenting the event as part of UA’s observance of National Poetry and National Jazz months. The project is based on the poem “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz” by Langston Hughes, the poet and novelist.

McCurdy, professor at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, will perform with a jazz quartet to a multimedia presentation featuring the words, life and images of Hughes. Film director Damini Baker has linked words and music in a kaleidoscope of images.

“This multimedia presentation re-creates Hughes’s vision of the global struggle for freedom in the early 1960s,” says Dr. DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor, chair of UA’s department of gender and race studies. “The audience will experience the mood of the Harlem Renaissance in this 800-line suite of poems, illustrated by the spoken word and accompanied by a live jazz quartet and the large as life visual illustrations on screen of Hughes’ world through his collaborators and contemporaries.”

The event is free and open to the public.

Sponsors are gender and race studies, The College of Arts and Sciences,  School of Music, Martin Luther King Jr. Realizing the Dream Committee, The College of Communication and Information Sciences, American studies, the Arts & Sciences Diversity Committee and New College.

For details, contact Danette Jolly-Stewart at  205/348-5761 or dfulton@as.ua.edu.