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TWO EVENINGS OF MUSIC WILL CELEBRATE POET LANGSTON HUGHES’ CENTENNIAL
NOVEMBER 6, 2002--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--at Oberlin College’s Finney Chapel Wednesday, November 20, as part of the "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 beginning at 9:00 p.m. The live broadcast will also be simulcast on the WCPN’s web site.
The complete program for the evening, which begins at 8:00 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, a work by Oberlin Assistant Professor of Composition Jeffrey Mumford, is free and open to the public.
"Ask Your Mama" premiered in April 2002, with Brown, Allen, and the Jazz Heritage Orchestra, at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland as 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 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 Oberlin Conservatory of Music. "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.
Langston Hughes
Celebration Continues November 22
A free, public concert Friday, November 22, at 6:30 p.m. in the
Conservatory’s Warner Concert Hall continues Oberlin’s tribute
to Langston Hughes. The Oberlin College Choir, conducted by Hugh Floyd,
will perform "The Ballad of the Brown King," with Hughes’
text set to music by the African American composer Margaret Bonds. This
event represents part of Oberlin senior Marti Newland’s African American
Studies honors project. She will speak briefly before the performance
about Bonds’ life, music, and close friendship with Hughes. A question-and-answer
session will follow.
Newland says the discussion will focus on "Black female composers’ use of the Black idiom in classical European music--using Bonds as an example--and other issues such as the proper vocal technique necessary for singing vocal music in the Black idiom." In addition to her major in African American Studies in the College, Newland is also a vocal performance major in the Conservatory.
About Wendell Logan
Wendell
Logan has received numerous commissions and won many awards for his compositions
and performances, including four from the National Endowment for the Arts,
a dozen or so ASCAP awards in a 15-year-span, three Ohio Arts Council
grants and, in 1991, the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Also that
year, he won the Cleveland Arts Prize in Music. In 1994, he was a fellow
at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy.
He has performed in Africa and the Caribbean as well as throughout the United States. A soprano saxophonist and a classically trained composer, he coordinates and performs with the celebrated Oberlin Jazz Faculty Octet.
His work can be heard on the Orion, Golden Crest, and RPM Records labels, among others. Logan holds a Ph.D. in composition from the University of Iowa.
More information about Logan and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music’s jazz studies program can be found online.
Media Contact: Marci Janas
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