Join us for a multimedia concert performance, Langston Hughes’ kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite, “Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz,” featuring Malcolm-Jamal Warner and the Ron McCurdy Quartet.

The twelve-part epic 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. Hughes scored the piece 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.

By way of videography, this concert performance links the words and music of Hughes’ poetry to topical images of Ask Your Mama’s people, places, and events, as well as to the visual artists Langston Hughes admired or collaborated with over the course of his career.

Dr. Ronald C. McCurdy is a professor of music at the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California (USC), and is a 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. Dr. McCurdy served as the director of the National Grammy Vocal Jazz Ensemble and Combo, and as Director of the Walt Disney All-American College Band in Anaheim, CA, for two decades.

This event, co-hosted by Paradise Valley Community College, is free and open to the community.