Ice-T and Ron McCurdy – the Langston Hughes Project

Name: Ice-T and Ron McCurdy – the Langston Hughes Project
Start: 2015-11-21T19:30:00+00:00
End: 2015-11-21T22:30:00+00:00
Location: Barbican Centre

Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz

Rapper and Actor Ice-T joins Musical Director/Trumpeter Ron McCurdy in a brilliant realisation of Langston Hughes’s creative masterpiece Ask Your Mama – the work of a major figure in African-American cultural history interpreted by a 21st-century counterpart.

Dedicated to Louis Armstrong and devised in the 60s, but unperformed at the time of Hughes’ death in 1967, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz recreates a magical moment in a journey from the Harlem Renaissance through the beat poets and the birth of bebop, to the looming explosion of black performance arts in the 1960s.

Ask Your Mama takes you from the blues, gospel and New Orleans to bebop and beyond. With a vivid visual backdrop, the performance evokes the life and times of an American icon to illuminate his vision of the struggle for freedom in the early 60s – a message that resonates as strongly today as ever.