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Two Evenings of Music Celebrate
the Centennial of Poet Langston Hughes
by Marci Janas '91
RELATED
Ballad Of The Brown King with Oberlin
College Choir Nov. 22
 Poet Langston Hughes |
When poet Langston Hughes wrote his classic "Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz," he specified that certain parts of the text be set to or accompanied by music. When Oberlin composer Wendell Logan first encountered the poem, he knew he would take Hughes up on the idea.
Logan will reprise the fruit of his efforts -- a work for big band, soprano, and tenor -- on Wednesday, November 20, in Finney Chapel as part of "Centennial Celebration: In Memory of Langston Hughes." Logan's "Ask Your Mama," performed by the Oberlin Jazz Ensemble and vocalists William Brown and Ki Allen, is showcased during the second half of the program, and will be broadcast live on WCPN 90.3 FM, ideastream, Cleveland Public Radio, beginning at 9 p.m. The live broadcast will also be simulcast on the station's web site at wcpn.org.
 Composer, Chair of Jazz Studies and Professor of African American Music Wendell Logan |
The complete program for the
evening begins at 8 p.m. with a dance and poetry presentation featuring
students in the Oberlin College class "Blues Aesthetic," followed
by Ki Allen and Trio performing backlash blues, Nina Simone's melody set
to Hughes' text, and "Dream Dust," a work by Oberlin Assistant
Professor of Composition Jeffrey
Mumford. The event is free and open to the public.
"Ask Your Mama" had its premiere April 21, 2002, with Brown, Allen, and the Jazz Heritage Orchestra, at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland. The premiere was part of Cleveland's Tri-C Jazz Festival, which had commissioned the piece.
"We commissioned Wendell Logan to write a work because of his wonderful national reputation as composer, steeped in both traditions-jazz and classical," Teri Pontremoli, director of the Tri-C Jazz Festival, told an interviewer with Cleveland radio station WKHR.
The timing was fortuitous.
"The idea of creating
the piece was lingering around in my head for some time," says Logan,
who is chair of the jazz studies program and professor of African American
music at the Conservatory. "The commission made it an opportune time
to sketch out my ideas for the piece." Logan began work in January
2002 and completed the piece in March. As with much of Logan's work, "Ask
Your Mama" is versatile and hybridized, incorporating various idioms
derived from African American music traditions such as jazz and the blues.
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