EMMY AWARD-WINNING COMPOSER LAURA KARPMAN AND LANGSTON HUGES’ ASK YOUR MAMA WINS 2016 GRAMMY
Recording features Janai Brugger, Angela Brown, Nnenna Freelon, The Roots,
George Manahan and the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra
Los Angeles, CA. – Four-time Emmy Award winning composer Laura Karpman’s epic multi-media ASK YOUR MAMA has just won a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Compendium category. Karpman, described by Variety Magazine as “one of the most important women in Hollywood,” gives us a true 21st century marriage between her own bold, evocative all-embracing music and technological genius and the lyric legacy of Langston Hughes, the pre-eminent voice of the African-American experience. The cast of legendary performers features sopranos Janai Brugger and Angela Brown, hip-hop innovators The Roots and Medusa, jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon, along with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, conducted by Grammy-nominated George Manahan.
Laura Karpman’s ASK YOUR MAMA premiered to a sold-out Carnegie Hall, which also commissioned the work, in 2009 and has played from Harlem’s Apollo Theater to the Hollywood Bowl, with additional performances in coming season.
Karpman’s panoramic score is the first major vocal setting of Hughes’ most modernist, defiant work, ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 Moods For Jazz. Using Hughes’s own voice at its core, the work takes its cue not only from Hughes’s boundary-exploding text, but also from his musical notations in the margins of the poem, suggesting cool jazz, German lieder, patriotic songs, post-bop, spirituals, Arabic and African drumming, and more. Integrating 21st century technology, Karpman brings Hughes’s words to life weaving a compelling tapestry of orchestral music, live singers, spoken word artists, and recorded voices of icons from Louis Armstrong to Leontyne Price to Pigmeat Markham. The result: an exhilarating tapestry of jazz, carnivale, tent revival, opera and poetry slam, as he and Karpman take us on an odyssey from Africa to the Americas, high art to low art, from south to north, from cities to suburbs, from opera to jazz – and in Hughes’ own words, “from shadows to fire.”
This is another notch in the belt of the Emmy, Annie, G.A.N.G award winning Karpman, whose recent and upcoming premieres include “Siren Songs” for the Pacific Symphony; “Wilde Tales,” a children’s opera for the Glimmerglass Festival, for which she received an Opera America female composer grant; Hidden World of Girls, with the Kitchen Sisters for the Cabrillo Festival, the score for WGN America’s upcoming “Underground” series (with composer Raphael Saadiq and Executive Producer John Legend) and beyond. She’s a professor at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and Founder of the recently formed Alliance for Women Film Composers.