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Rap Legend Ice-T and Jazz Trumpeter Ron McCurdy Debut The Langston Hughes Project At The Barbican On November 21, 2016 At 7:30pm!

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Rap Legend and actor Ice-T joins musical director and trumpeter Ron McCurdy, along with the Ron McCurdy Quartet, to bring a brilliant 21st century realization of American icon Langston Hughes’ creative masterpiece, the epic twelve-part jazz poem: Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. A homage in verse, music, and multi-media to the struggle for artistic and social freedom at the beginning of the 1960s, Ask Your Mama evokes Hughes’ life and times and a message that resonates as strongly today as ever.

Ask Your Mama can be described as the soundtrack of the sixties, showing Langston Hughes at his best: insightful, wise, poignant, funny and soulful with a powerful social commentary. The multimedia European premiere concert performance of Ask Your Mama at the Barbican on Saturday, November 21st, 2015 will include:

Spoken word with Ice-T as the narrator

Live music from the Ron McCurdy Quartet—featuring Ron McCurdy (trumpet, flute), Yuma Sung (piano), Mark Hodgson (bass) and Mark Mondesir (drums) – with original music composed by Ron McCurdy based on the music cues suggested by Langston Hughes;

A vivid visual backdrop, featuring the works of African American visual artists who Langston Hughes admired or collaborated with most closely over the course of his career, and including African-inspired mural designs and cubist geometries of Aaron Douglas, blues and jazz-inspired collages of Romare Bearden, macabre grotesques of Meta Warrick Fuller, rhythmic sculptural figurines and heads and bas-reliefs of Richmond Barthe and the colour blocked cityscapes and black history series of Palmer Hayden and Jacob Lawrence.

Together the words, sounds and images recreate the journey from the Harlem Renaissance through the beat poets and the birth of bebop, to the looming explosion of black performance art in the 1960s—from the blues, gospel and New Orleans to bebop and beyond.

A seminal figure in African-American cultural history and unofficial poet laureate of Harlem, Langston Hughes devised Ask Your Mama in the early 1960s, dedicating the work to Louis Armstrong – “the greatest horn blower of them all,” but it remained unperformed at the time of Hughes’ death in 1967.

Hughes’ musical scoring of the poem was designed to serve not only as a mere background for the words but to forge a conversation and a commentary with the music, and cues were drawn from blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, bebop and progressive jazz, Latin “cha cha” and Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming.

Ice-T and Ron McCurdy premiered The Langston Hughes Project, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz in 2008 and will present the European premiere at the Barbican this November.

Ice-T said: “I am looking forward to performing with Ron McCurdy again and to bringing this project to London audiences for the first time. Langston Hughes’ brilliance and vision is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s."

Before the performance on Saturday, November 21, there will also be a panel discussion at 5pm: Langston Hughes – The Legacy in the Barbican’s Fountain Room. Inspired by The Langston Hughes Project, the discussion includes writer and editor Margaret Busby and Birmingham City University’s Nicholas Gebhardt.

For more information on the Langston Hughes Project or for booking information visit: The Langston Hughes Project

To purchase tickets for the performance visit: Barbican Tickets For The Langston Hughes Project

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For more information contact .

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