 | Ice-T and Ron McCurdy present the European premiere of The Langston Hughes Project , Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz at the Barbican this November as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival 2015 Ice-T and Ron McCurdy – the Langston Hughes Project
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz
Saturday 21 November 2015
Barbican Hall / 15:00 &19:30
Tickets: £15 – 40 plus booking fee
Produced by the Barbican in association with Serious
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Rapper and actor Ice-T joins musical director and trumpeter Ron McCurdy and his quartet in a brilliant 21st century realisation of American icon Langston Hughes’ creative masterpiece, the epic twelve-part jazz poem suite Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. A homage in verse and music to the struggle for artistic and social freedom at the beginning of the 1960s, Ask Your Mama evokes Hughes’ life and times and a message that resonates as strongly today as ever.
Ask Your Mama can be described as the soundtrack of the sixties, showing Langston Hughes at his best: insightful, wise, poignant, funny and soulful with a powerful social commentary.
The two multimedia European premiere concert performances of Ask Your Mama at the Barbican on Sunday 21 November will include:
- Spoken word with Ice-T as the narrator
- Live music from the Ron McCurdy Quartet – featuring Ron McCurdy (trumpet, flute), Yuma Sung (piano), Mark Hodgson (bass) and Mark Mondesir (drums) – with original music composed by Ron McCurdy based on the music cues suggested by Langston Hughes
- A vivid visual backdrop , featuring the works of African American visual artists who Langston Hughes admired or collaborated with most closely over the course of his career, and including African-inspired mural designs and cubist geometries of Aaron Douglas, blues and jazz-inspired collages of Romare Bearden, macabre grotesques of Meta Warrick Fuller, rhythmic sculptural figurines and heads and bas-reliefs of Richmond Barthe and the colour blocked cityscapes and black history series of Palmer Hayden and Jacob Lawrence
Together the words, sounds and images recreate the journey from the Harlem Renaissance through the beat poets and the birth of bebop, to the looming explosion of black performance art in the 1960s – from the blues, gospel and New Orleans to bebop and beyond.
A seminal figure in African-American cultural history and unofficial poet laureate of Harlem, Langston Hughes devised Ask Your Mama in the early 1960s, dedicating the work to Louis Armstrong – “the greatest horn blower of them all,” but it remained unperformed at the time of Hughes’ death in 1967.
Hughes’ musical scoring of the poem was designed to serve not only as a mere background for the words but to forge a conversation and a commentary with the music, and cues were 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.
Ice-T and Ron McCurdy premiered The Langston Hughes Project, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz in 2008 and will present the European premiere at the Barbican this November.
Ice-T said: “I am looking forward to performing with Ron McCurdy again and to bringing this project to London audiences for the first time. Langston Hughes’ brilliance and vision is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s.”
In-between the two concert performances on Saturday 21 November at 5pm there will also be a panel discussion: Langston Hughes – The Legacy in the Barbican’s Fountain Room. In spired by The Langston Hughes Project, the discussion includes writer and editor Margaret Busby and Birmingham City University’s Nicholas Gebhardt.
An accompanying film programme in the Barbican cinemas as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival sees the evolution of jazz alongside the civil rights movement in the 1960s mirrored by contemporary concerns that continue to occupy the creative drive of today’s artists.
Screenings include: a double bill of director Mike Dodd’s 1983 films The Saxophonist: The Antithesis of War and Good Friends filmed at the 1981 Camden Jazz Festival featuring jazz greats Archie Shepp and Chris McGregor (14 November, Cinema 2, 2pm); two documentaries from 2014: Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story by director NC Heiken (14 November, Cinema 2, 4pm) and Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Case of the Three-Sided Dream (15 November, Cinema 2, 4pm); JACO (2015) by director Stephen Kijak/ Paul Marchand and produced by Metallica bassist, Robert Trujillo (16 November, Cinema 3, 8.45pm) and Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World (1963) - a stark and powerful film capturing the essence of life in 1960s gangs set to Dizzy Gillespie’s celebrated jazz score (17 November, Cinema 3, 8.45pm)
ENDS
Notes to Editors
Barbican Box Office: 0845 120 7550
www.barbican.org.uk
Press Information
For any further information, images or to arrange interviews, please contact the Barbican’s music media relations team:
Annikaisa Vainio-Miles, Media Relations Manager
t - +44 (0)20 7382 7090
e – annikaisa.vainio-miles@barbican.org.uk
Sabine Kindel, Senior Media Relations Officer
t - +44 (0)20 7382 6199
e – sabine.kindel@barbican.org.uk
Eleanor Nimmo, Media Relations Officer
t - +44 (0)20 7382 6196
e – eleanor.nimmo@barbican.org.uk
Sagar Shah, Media Relations Assistant
t - +44 (0)20 7382 6138
e – sagar.shah@barbican.org.uk
About the Barbican
A world-class arts and learning organisation, the Barbican pushes the boundaries of all major art forms including dance, film, music, theatre and visual arts. Its creative learning programme further underpins everything it does. Over 1.5 million people pass through the Barbican’s doors annually, hundreds of artists and performers are featured, and more than 300 staff work onsite. The architecturally renowned centre opened in 1982 and comprises the Barbican Hall, the Barbican Theatre, the Pit, Cinemas One, Two and Three, Barbican Art Gallery, a second gallery The Curve, foyers and public spaces, a library, Lakeside Terrace, a glasshouse conservatory , conference facilities and three restaurants. The City of London Corporation is the founder and principal funder of the Barbican Centre. The Barbican also presents events in the Guildhall School’s new Milton Court Concert Hall. Find us on Facebook | Twitter | Flickr | YouTube
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