Malcolm Jamal-Warner to narrate Salt Lake City concert of Langston Hughes’ epic jazz poem

The child of educators, musician Ron McCurdy grew up schooled in the stories of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, W.C. Handy and other prominent African-American writers and musicians.

In 1996, as a jazz professor and chair of the Afro-African American studies department at the University of Minnesota, McCurdy was asked to create a musical work for the opening of the university's Weisman Art Museum. That's when he turned to Hughes' epic 1960 poem, "Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz." Hughes had written musical cues into his poem and planned to finish the work as a performance piece in collaboration with double bassist Charles Mingus, but that didn't happen before the writer's death in 1967.

So the trumpeter composed original pieces from Hughes' musical cues and presented the work in what he expected would be a one-night-only concert for the museum's opening. The enthusiastic response prompted McCurdy to continue refining "Ask Your Mama," which now also features video montages illuminating the historical figures and places anchored in Hughes' poem.

His compositions are drawn from blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, bebop, progressive jazz, Latin cha-cha, Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso and African drumming.

McCurdy and his quartet will perform the jazz poem at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Kingsbury Hall (see box for ticket information) as part of a 50-date tour that includes stopovers in Idaho, Indiana and Washington. Headlining the Utah show is narrator Malcolm-Jamal Warner, an actor on "Major Crimes" and "Sons of Anarchy" who came to prominence as Theo in "The Cosby Show." He's also a jazz bassist who received a Grammy Award last weekend for his work as a featured performer on Robert Glasper's version of the Stevie Wonder classic "Jesus Children of America." Warner was set to speak to a group in Salt Lake City on Tuesday during an event hosted by Zions Bank's Black Business Forum.

What's remarkable about "Ask Your Mama" is how Hughes' themes still resound against the backdrop of national protests sparked by the deaths of young African-American men at the hands of police in Missouri, New York and even closer to home, in Saratoga Springs.

The jazz poem also showcases Hughes' witty, satirical voice, as he includes himself as a character. Hughes playfully draws upon the lyrics of a blues standard about a separate couple, attributed to W.C. Handy and others, known as "Hesitating Blues" or "Hesitation Blues." The lyric "How long must I have to wait" changes from a romantic lament to an impatient call for civil rights.

"All these social issues are pretty much what Langston Hughes was writing about 50 years ago," says McCurdy, now a music professor at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California.

McCurdy, who has also scored Gabrielle Denise Pina's "Letters from Zora," considers performing "Ask Your Mama" an extension of his classroom, although the only quiz for listeners will be a challenge to find out more about the artists Hughes name-checks in the piece, including Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone and Sojourner Truth.

He says college students leave with curiosity to find out more about African-American artists of the era, while older listeners are likely to recall what it was like to live in a segregated America.

It's such a powerful work, for both performers and listeners, that McCurdy says he plans to continue performing it, as long as people keep calling for bookings.

ellenf@sltrib.com

facebook.com/ellen.weist