At 7:30 PM on Monday, April 12, the Langston Hughes Project, a USC-based multimedia arts group, will perform Hughes’s jazz poem suite Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961) at the PSU Theater.  Project leader Dr. Ron McCurdy describes Ask Your Mama as:

Hughes's homage in verse and music to the struggle for artistic and social freedom at home and abroad at the beginning of the 1960s. It is a twelve-part epic poem which Hughes scored with musical cues drawn from blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, bebop and progressive jazz, Latin "cha cha" and Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming—a creative masterwork left unperformed at his death. 

In advance of the evening performance, Dr. McCurdy will hold a series of daytime workshops on campus: “The Role of Art in a Social Movement” (10:45-11:35 AM; PSU Theater), “The Creative Process” (2:00-2:50 PM; PSU Theater), and “Navigating a Career in Music” (3:15-4:30 PM; PSU Theater).