Photographs courtesy of Nan Melville for Ask Your Mama.
“Ask Your Mama,” a music, film, and spoken-word presentation that debuted at Carnegie Hall this week, is a spirited interpretation of Langston Hughes’s epic poem of the same name. The original text, which Hughes started writing at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival and completed in 1961, is subtitled “12 Moods for Jazz” and is dedicated to Louis Armstrong, “the greatest horn blower of them all.” In it, Hughes’s words move from high culture to low, from the streets to the rural South, and to the freedom of Niagara Falls. For the “poetically unhep,” Hughes describes the poem’s themes in the back of the book, but even the dullest of cats will find the intensity, hope, and desperation in his words without need of explanation.
Extraordinarily, Hughes’s love for jazz spills out into the margins, where he inked a score to accompany his stanzas, skipping from Hot Jazz to German Leider, Harlem to Rio. When Hughes died, in 1967, the performance on which he had intended to collaborate with the composer Charles Mingus went unfinished.
Five years ago, however, Laura Karpman picked up where Hughes left off.Karpman, who studied under Milton Babbitt at Julliard and has won four Emmys for her film and television work, honors Hughes’s poem without matching it exactly. Her libretto weaves together music from the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and recorded selections from Bo Diddley to Charlie Parker, to Hughes himself, whose voice sneaks in like a ghost from time to time. Vocals from de’Adre Aziza, Tracie Luck, and the renowned soprano Jessye Norman are stunning in their feeling, and spoken word by Black Thought with percussion from ?uestlove (pronounced “Questlove”), of the hip-hop group the Roots, add deep, rumbling gravity. Extra musical elements, from kazoos to whistles, to a wind machine, to stomping in unison—”If you could just please give a stomp for Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman,” Karpman begged the musicians during their rehearsal the day before the show—brought the high-tech sampling and high-art voices back to earth.
The performance is haunting, fevered, restrained, and super-lush in turns, but always impressive. Karpman says, “The artists, with whom I have had the most inspiring collaborations, have lent their brains and hearts and awesome musicianship to this project. Jessye Norman is equal part shocking and sublime. ?uestlove is without question the most remarkable drummer I have ever worked with. Black Thought makes Langston come alive with rhyme and delivery that transports the poetry from 1961 to 2009. A real surprise for me has been de’Adre Aziza, who is able to evoke the many voices and characters of ‘Ask Your Mama.’ Tracie Luck brought warmth and tremendous resonance through her majestic voice. George Manahan, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Rico Gatson, Kate Howard, and Annie Dorsen all inspired me and brought so much to the work.”
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