The Langston Hughes Project

Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz

2/3/10 7:00 PM

In conjunction with Barnes & Noble and Birmingham Museum of Art, and The Alabama State Council on the Arts under the artistic direction of Dr. Ron McCurdy, the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame will present the epic 12-part poem, Ask Your Mama:Twelve Moods for Jazz, also called the Langston Hughes Project, at the Steiner Auditorium at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Wednesday, February 3, 2010, with a evening show at 7:00pm.This multimedia presentation involves spoken word, a jazz trio and video images that correlate with the poem. In addition to the performance, Dr. McCurdy and his colleagues plan to hold a discussion group about the works of Langston Hughes. The Langston Hughes Project is a multimedia concert performance of Langston Hughes’s kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. Ask Your Mama:12 Moods for Jazz is Hughes’s homage in verse and music to the struggle for artistic andsocial 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 Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming -- a creative masterwork left unperformed at his death. By way of videography, this concert performance links the words and music of Hughes’ poetry to topical images of people, places, and events. Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz 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.

Swing Dance Classes

Every Saturday from 2:00PM-3:00PM

Come have some fun and learn to Swing Dance with Pasquale' Williams every Saturday from 2-3PM. Classes can be attended as a couple or single. Learn such dances as Walk the Floor,Swing,Latin Hustle, and jitterbug, Waltz, & Fox Trox. Cost: $15/person. For class availability call 254-2731 Ext 21

Great Upcoming Events:

Student Jazz Band Festival

March 25th-27th, 2010

T.S. Monk Jazz Clinic

March 27th, 2010 9:00AM .

Please check out our Jazz Education page for more details on these events