Pacific Symphony’s multimedia “Langston Hughes Project,” with narrator and jazz quartet

On February 27, California’s Pacific Symphony will present “The Langston Hughes Project,” a multimedia concert featuring Hughes’s 1960 jazz poem suite Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz. Music Director Carl St.Clair will lead the Pacific Symphony, joined by narrator Terrence A. Carson and the Ron McCurdy Quartet. The quartet consists of Ron McCurdy (trumpet and spoken word), Yuma Sung (piano), Max Kraus (acoustic bass), and Reggie Quinerly (drums and percussion). The musical score includes blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, bebop, progressive jazz, Latin cha-cha, Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming, and is meant to forge a conversation and a commentary. The Pacific Symphony presentation will feature images by visual artists Langston Hughes admired and/or collaborated with, including Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, Meta Warrick Fuller, Richmond Barthé, Palmer Hayden, and Jacob Lawrence. For more information visit the Pacific Symphony’s website.