Ask Your Mama, the extraordinary new work that made a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall last season "thunder its approval" (The New York Times), fills the stage on Friday evening, April 1at 8pm to aid the victims of Haiti's devastating earthquake. Hailed by The Los Angeles Times for "its feeling of freshness and uncanny currency," this remarkable collaboration between Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman and world-renowned soprano Jessye Norman journeys from Africa to the Americas, South to North, cities to suburbs, opera to jazz, gospel to be-bop, and "shadows to fire," reflecting the pathways of Langston Hughes's epic Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. The performance benefits Partners in Health and the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, and begins at 8pm in the Rose Theater in Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center
The event features the artistry of the iconic
Jessye Norman (recent recipient of the 2009 National Medal of the Arts), honey-voiced jazz great Nnenna Freelon, Grammy Award-winning hip-hop band The Roots, Tony Award-nominated vocalist
De'Adre Aziza, and the esteemed and adventurous Maestro
George Manahan conducting Orchestra of St Luke's, with a special with a special reading by Michael Eric Dyson.
Speaking about what motivated her to mount this performance as a benefit for Hati, composer
Laura Karpman turned to a passage in Ask Your Mama. "I came to realize that when
Langston Hughes wrote about a `steep hill,' he meant the one on which Haiti's Citadel is perched. A fortress built by former Haitian slaves to defend against an attack from the French, the Citadel has been a symbol of resistance and liberation by the astonishingly brave Haitian people. They had the audacity to revolt, and successfully defeated the mighty Napoleon. And in 2010, even this powerful earthquake couldn't bring The Citadel down. But the quake unearthed poverty rooted in the history of people who won their own freedom through revolution. It is this poverty, even more powerful than the earthquake, which has caused such wretched destruction."
From the outset, Hughes (1902-67) conceived Ask Your Mama as an interdisciplinary creation, penning an imaginary, kaleidoscopic soundtrack in the margins of each page as an accompaniment to his words-hot jazz, German lieder, cha-cha, patriotic songs, post-bop, Middle Eastern music, Afro-Caribbean drumming. Using these cues and Hughes's own recorded voice, as well as quotations from
Louis Armstrong, Big Maybelle, Pigmeat Markham, and Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, Karpman's work evokes the turbulent flux and flow of American cultural life, creating "vocals that are stunning in their feeling, and spoken word that adds deep, rumbling gravity" (Vanity Fair).
Laura Karpman was raised on bebop and Beethoven, and trained at Juilliard, where she played jazz and scatted in bars. With more than a hundred media credits to her name, she has written acclaimed music for theater, film, video games, television, and the foremost concert stages across the globe. She was among the first composers to be invited to
The Sundance Institute Film Scoring Lab (studying with Dave Grusin), and has collaborated with
Steven Spielberg,
Barbara Koppel, PBS, Smithsonian and more. Her concert works have been hailed in performances by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop, and the Detroit, Richmond, Seattle and Prague Symphonies. Karpman's score is the first major vocal setting of Hughes's great text.
For Tickets ranging from $25 to $200:
Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office
Broadway at 60th Street, Ground Floor
Monday-Saturday 10am-6pm, Sunday 12pm-6pm
CenterCharge 212-721-6500
www.jalc.org,
www.askyourmama.com,
www.pih.com,
http://clintonbushhaitifund.org
photo: Catherine Byrd
