The Roots, Jessye Norman, Nnenna Freelon, George Manahan, And Hollywood Bowl Orchestra Together On Stage In Laura Karpman‘s ASK YOUR MAMA
Los Angeles, CA — May 28, 2009. The exciting new work that made the sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall “thunder its approval,“ (New York Times) takes the stage at the Hollywood Bowl for its West Coast premiere on August 30. This remarkable collaboration between Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman and world-renowned soprano Jessye Norman takes audiences from Africa to the Americas, from the South to the North, from cities to suburbs, opera to jazz, gospel to be-bop, and “shadows to fire,” reflecting the pathways of Langston Hughes’s epic ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ .
The stunning panoramic score weaves a luminous tapestry of orchestral music and recorded selections drawn from a dozen traditions. Using Hughes’s own voice at the core of the work, this musical journey includes quotations from Louis Armstrong, Big Maybelle, Pigmeat Markham and Bill Bojangles, all seamlessly integrated with projected images by Rico Gatson and archival video as well as Hughes’s vibrant poetry. Artists for the performance are Miss Norman, honeyed voice jazz great Nnenna Freelon, Grammy award-winning hip-hop band The Roots, and the esteemed and adventurous Maestro George Manahan conducting the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.
From the outset, Hughes (1902-67) conceived ASK YOUR MAMA as an interdisciplinary creation, actually penning an imaginary soundtrack in the margin of each page as an accompaniment to his words. As his subtitle “Twelve Moods for Jazz” suggests, Hughes imagined a kaleidoscope of styles — hot jazz, German lieder, cha-cha, patriotic songs, post-bop, Middle Eastern music, Afro-Caribbean drumming. Using these cues Karpman evokes the turbulent flux and flow of American cultural life to create her “Vocals that are stunning in their feeling, and spoken word that added deep, rumbling gravity” (Vanity Fair). Ubiquitous is The Hesitation Blues, which asks “How long will I have to wait?”, an auditory emblem of the American dream deferred, of justice and equality lying just out of reach.
ASK YOUR MAMA first appeared in 1961, yet its heady mixture of high culture and street talk is startlingly current. Technology has evolved as well: the boundary-crossing score that Hughes “composed” to accompany his text has finally been brought to life, jumping from Harlem to Rio, from hot jazz to Hip-hop, with the click of a mouse or the beat of a baton.
Composer Karpman was raised on bebop and Beethoven, and trained at Juilliard, where she played jazz and scatted in bars. But in 1988, the multi-faceted Karpman left her concert stage roots in New York for the film, TV and interactive media worlds in LA, where she has risen to great heights: she was among the first composers to be invited to the Sundance Institute Film Scoring Lab (studying with Dave Grusin), has collaborated with Steven Spielberg, Barbara Koppel, Kathy Bates, Martin Bell, and others, and earned four Emmy Awards (nominated for eight more). Her concert works have been hailed in performances by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop, Juilliard Chorus, and the Detroit, Richmond, Seattle and Prague Symphonies.
Karpman’s score is the first major vocal setting of Hughes’s great text. ASK YOUR MAMA bursts the boundaries of time, place, and verbal expression to trace the currents and tributaries of cultural diasporas, an altogether timely and true intersection of art and politics.
Tickets ($28 – $116) are on sale now at www.HollywoodBowl.com, at the Hollywood Bowl Box Office (Tuesday–Saturday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.), or by calling Ticketmaster at 800.745.3000, and at all Ticketmaster outlets. Groups of 10 or more may be eligible for a 20% discount, subject to availability; call 323.850.2050 for further details. For general information or to request a brochure, call 323.850.2000.