A Jazzed-Up Langston Hughes
A long-forgotten poem about the African-American experience is given new life in a multimedia performance featuring singer Jessye Norman
- By Laban Carrick Hill
- Smithsonian.com, March 13, 2009, Subscribe
“The words need to float above the orchestra,” composer Laura Karpman instructs world-renown soprano Jessye Norman who is singing passages of Langston Hughes’ most ambitious though nearly forgotten work, his 1960s epic poem Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. Sitting in folding chairs in a Carnegie Hall rehearsal room, Norman and Karpman, along with mezzo-soprano Tracie Luck and jazz vocalist de’Adre Aziza, prepare for the first major performance of Hughes’s jazz poem, which premieres on March 16 at the historic theater.
“Of course,” replies Norman, who has sung at the hall dozens of times. She lifts her chin, and in the voice that has thrilled millions of grand opera lovers the words take flight, soaring to the rafters. But this music isn't about a tragic heroine; it's about the African American experience.
Luck and Aziza join in, the three distinct voices merging and separating as the piano accompanist plays a stripped-down version of Karpman’s multi-layered score.
Diamonds in pawn
(And I never had a diamond
in my natural life)
Me
In the White House
(And ain't never had a black house)
Do, Jesus!
Lord!
Amen!
They repeat the “Amen” several times, then erupt in laughter and smiles. The lines resonate with everyone in the room. Hughes’s phrase “Me in the White House” seems both funny and prescient just a month after the inauguration of the first African-American president.
Hughes’s Ask Your Mama is playful and serious all at once. He teases the reader by couching his verse in the black urban expression known as the “dozens," but the work is intended to dig deep into the American consciousness. Hughes’s biographer, Arnold Rampersad, describes the sardonic verbal jousting as "a familiar ritual of personal insult in the black American world.” The title of the poem is a “dozens” riposte and is repeated throughout the work.
They asked me at the PTA
Is it true that Negroes—?
I said, ask your mama.
Hughes began the cycle of poems after witnessing white youths rioting at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival because the performances were sold out. Perhaps he saw the irony in the fact that whites were now fighting for the right to see black performers and sensed a shifting of old ways. When Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz appeared in 1961, the collection was largely ignored by reviewers and the public, according to Rampersad. Shortly after Hughes death, the book went out of print and only a few small-scale performances have been staged.
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Comments (1)
In listening to your clip and reading the article, my heart hurt a bit and I felt a sadness that these kinds of awesome performances and works of art do not get to reach but a few areas, where but a privileged few get the benefit of enjoyment and awe. When I was young (now going on 67) , in a cotton farming town in the deep south, we were called out of classes, into assembly, to experience all kinds of performances. There were concerts, in many difference venues that were held in the evenings, in the high school gyn, for the towns people. These experiences influenced my life, and others, to move out into the world for adventure and discovery of the arts. That has now all but been removed from our education system, and removed from small town experience. What young person, regardless of skin color, in a small, now all but dead, farming community in the deep south, or anywhere else in this country, will get to know about Langston Hughes and his work? What do we do about this? The national spirit and soul depends on finding our way back to the arts, that in turn can find its way into the smallest and most isolated parts of our country. What do we do about this? Television and IPODS and MP3 & 4 Players are not the answer. The "Live" experience can never be replaced. What can we do about this? Adolphine Carole New Mexico ... USA
Posted by Adolphine Carole on March 15,2009 | 12:49 PM