Kansas City Kansas Community College

The internationally recognized Ron McCurdy Quartet will perform “Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods of Jazz” at Kansas City Kansas Community College Wednesday, March 11.

A multi-media concert based on a poetic masterwork by poet-playwright Langston Hughes, it will be performed from 9-11 a.m. in the Performing Arts Center on the KCKCC campus at 7250 State Avenue. Sponsored by the Intercultural Center, the concert is open to the public without charge.

An insightful, wise, poignant, funny and soulful poem, it will be accompanied by video images of the Harlem Renaissance by African American artists and photographers including Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks and Romare Bearden.

The chairman of Jazz Studies and Professor of Music at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, Dr. McCurdy is past president of the International Association of Jazz Educators and is in great demand as a guest clinician, soloist and speaker. He has also worked with such famed artists as Joe Williams, Rosemary Clooney, Leslie Uggams, Arturo Sandoval, Maynard Ferguson, Lionel Hampton and Dianne Reeves.

“Ask Your Mama” is a 12-part poetic suite written by Hughes in 1961 and recreates Hughes’ vision of the global struggle for freedom in the coming turbulent decade. When Hughes died in 1967 before a production could be developed, Dr. McCurdy and Dr. John Wright of the University of Minnesota collaborated to expand on Hughes’ original concept to add images of the Harlem Renaissance. Since then, “The Langston Hughes Project” has been performed by McCurdy and Wright in Carnegie Hall, on the college circuit and for African American Heritage celebrations throughout the nation.