His dazzling poems, by turns earnest, raffish and folksy, bulge with references to famous musicians and familiar sounds. Alongside verse set entirely in capital letters, Hughes provided detailed musical cues, some referring to specific songs or instruments, others pointing to general modes and tones.
Hughes, who began the work while attending the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, reportedly planned to create a musical version with the jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, among others, but died before seeing it through.
In “Ask Your Mama!,” a new setting presented to a capacity audience at Carnegie Hall on Monday night as part of the soprano Jessye Norman’s Honor! series, Laura Karpman, the composer, took Hughes’s indications at face value.
In a program note, Ms. Karpman, primarily active as a composer for television, film and video games, likened the process of setting Hughes’s text to “working with a brilliant, erudite ‘director.’ ”
In a sense, her approach seemed akin to that of a cinematographer, selecting the proper tools to implement Hughes’s instructions. When the text called for a flute or maracas, she provided them. Where Hughes stipulated “When the Saints Go Marching In,” you heard it.
Ms. Karpman’s primary narrator was Hughes himself, his dry, refined, recorded speech summoned with a sampling keyboard. Another sampler controlled recordings of Leontyne Price, Charlie Parker, Bo Diddley and other luminaries cited in the text, and of Ms. Norman herself.
Hughes never specified a jazz group; Ms. Karpman deployed a sizable orchestra, abetted by the drummer Questlove (Ahmir Thompson) from the Roots, the hip-hop group. Verses not narrated by Hughes were divided among four vocalists: Ms. Norman; Tracie Luck, a mezzo-soprano; de’Adre Aziza, an actress and jazz singer; and the Roots rapper Black Thought (Tarik Trotter).
