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Orchestra of St. Luke’s led by GeorgeManahanDuration: c. Part 1: c. 24 minutes; Part 3:c. 52 minutesScored for 3 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo,3rd doubling alto flute), oboe (doublingEnglish horn), clarinet (doublingbass clarinet), bassoon (doublingcontrabassoon), tenor saxophone, 4horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 4percussionists, timpani, harp, piano, andstrings, along with solo soprano, solo jazzvocalist(s), solo spoken word artists, andpre-recorded sound samplesAsk Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazzis the longest, most ambitiouspoem by James Mercer Langston Hughes(1901-67)—in one sense, the neglectedLeaves of Grass of American literary history.As the composer Laura Karpmanaptly stated in a radio interview in 2016:“It’s a great poem—period. It’s a greatAmerican poem that’s often relegatedto African American studies. Everyonereads Leaves of Grass, why not also readAsk Your Mama? It is a great work ofAmerican literature—period.”Hughes, the revered poet, playwright,novelist, and activist who became famousas a leader of the Harlem Renaissance,indeed counted Walt Whitman amonghis models—with whose status as a gayartist he may have felt a special affinity—along with Paul Laurence Dunbar andCarl Sandburg. A visit to the 1960 NewportJazz Festival seems to have inspiredthis epic version of his longstandingpractice of “jazz poetry,” in whichHughes transformed linguistic virtuosityand the sensitivity of a keen observerinto a poetic, improvisatory parallel tojazz. His dream was to collaborate withthe likes of Charles Mingus to realize themusic for which Hughes provides cluesand directions throughout the text—aproject that sadly never came to fruition.Fast forward to the early 2000s, whenLaura Karpman went on a search for jazzpoetry that would be suitable to combinewith a score she had originally writtenfor CBS, only to be told it was considered“too out there.” When she came acrossthe text of Ask Your Mama—Hughes hadhis epic printed entirely in upper caseletters, with musical annotations in themargins—Karpman experienced a shockof recognition.“I grew up listening to jazz and classicalmusic, as well as a host of othersounds,” she writes in her preface to thescore. “My mother would alternate wellwornLPs of Stravinsky, Bernstein, MilesDavis, and Wes Montgomery with occasionalflamenco and Hebrew folk songs.”For his part, Hughes calls for “rapid stylisticchanges” in his annotations to thepoems, which list popular songs, specificclassical pieces, and folk sources inan Ivesian cornucopia side-by-side withmusical icons whose signature styles areto be imitated—“from German lieder totraditional 12-bar blues,” as Karpmanputs it.“This world, where Strauss’s Die Nachtand Miles Davis’s So What live side-byside,is a world in which I feel very muchat home,” she writes. “Not only is it familiarfrom the eclectic music of my childhood,but also from my student days,when I studied at Juilliard with MiltonBabbitt by day and scat sang in jazzclubs by night, and then later as a filmcomposer, where one is asked to be versatile—sometimeseven gymnastic—inMarch 23, 2024 21
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