THE LANGSTON HUGHES PROJECT Multimedia Concert Plays Kingsbury Hall Tonight

The Langston Hughes Project is a multimedia concert performance of Langston Hughes' kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite titled, Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz. The poem 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.

The Langston Hughes Project, starring Malcolm Jamal-Warner with music by the Ron McCurdy Quartet, will be performed at Kingsbury Hall on the University of Utah campus tonight, February 12 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $29.50 to $49.50, with a $5 ticket for U of U students and a $10 ticket for all other students, and are available at www.kingtix.com or by calling 801-581-7100.

In conjunction with the performance, Kingsbury Hall Presents is pleased to announce it received a Challenge America grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in support of community engagement programs associated with this performance. The Challenge America category supports projects that extend the reach of the arts to underserved populations whose opportunities to experience the arts are limited by geography, ethnicity or economics. The $10,000 award will be used to bring students from schools in rural areas outside of Salt Lake City to Kingsbury Hall to attend a school matinee performance. This is Kingsbury Hall Presents' sixth grant from the NEA over the past five years, making it one of the most-awarded performing arts organizations in the region.

Additional community engagement events include a discussion of Langston Hughes' poetry with Hivemind, the city-wide book club, on February 5 at 7:00 PM at Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City, that is free and open to the public, as well as several classes taught by Dr. Ron McCurdy with jazz students in the University of Utah's School of Music. Malcolm Jamal-Warner will also be visiting two local schools to talk to students about the importance of education and staying in school.

Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz is a twelve-part epic poem which Hughes scored with musical cues drawn from blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, bebop, progressive jazz, Latin "cha cha," Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming - a creative masterwork left unperformed at his death. Read by Malcolm Jamal-Warner, currently starring on several TV series including Major Crimes and Sons of Anarchy but best know for his role as Theo Huxtable on The Cosby Show, the performance also includes music by the Ron McCurdy Quartet and incorporates engaging videography that links the words and music of Hughes' poetry to topical images of the poems people, places and events.

The performance is brought to life by the extraordinary talents of the Ron McCurdy Quartet. Dr. Ronald C. McCurdy is professor of music in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California (USC) and is Past-President of the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE). Prior to his appointment at USC he served as Director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at USC. Dr. McCurdy is the director of the National Grammy Vocal Jazz Ensemble and combo, and also serves as Director of the Walt Disney All-American College Band in Anaheim, CA.

Watch a clip from the show below!

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