Howard Reich
3:34 p.m. CDT, March 18, 2014
Few poets have captured the feeling of jazz – its rhythms, its cadences, its sense of freedom – more lyrically than Langston Hughes. The music courses through his words, which carry backbeats and melodies as seductive as those in any solo by a great jazz saxophonist.
Which is why jazz musicians long have been drawn to Hughes' writing. The latest is a young Chicago pianist who in the past few years has immersed himself in Hughes' work. So for Stu Mindeman's recording debut, "In Your Waking Eyes," he has convened some of the city's best musicians to perform his original settings of 11 Hughes poems.
That's an ambitious project for any jazz musician and a bold one for a 26-year-old making his first statement on disc. But Mindeman mostly pulls it off, applying Hughes' ineffably expressive words to melodies, syncopations and chord changes that somehow evoke the poet's Harlem Renaissance era but also ours, as well.
None of which would have been possible were it not for the jazz and blues sensibility that pervades so much of Hughes' writing.
"If you just read it out loud, it sounds like a swinging bebop line or a funky R&B melody or a blues melody – that's one of the reasons it translates so well," says Mindeman, who will perform this music Wednesday evening at eta Creative Arts Foundation and April 10 at Constellation.
"Also, he himself spent a lot of time with jazz musicians. I found a great recording of him reading an hour's worth of his own poetry with Charles Mingus' band. … It was really cool to hear him, because he was very animated – huge dynamic contrasts in his reading.
"For him, it wasn't only (about) the imagery and the words and the emotions but also the musicality of the words themselves and the sounds of the syllables. And you could tell from him reading the poems that that was how he thought about it as well."
By choosing to create songs embracing Hughes poems such as "Drum," "Africa," "Song for Billie Holiday" and "Blues at Dawn," Mindeman reminds listeners of the deep cultural pride that radiates from Hughes' poetry. Yet these pieces also underscore one unavoidable fact: Mindeman is viewing Hughes' work as an outsider.
"I'm a Caucasian American, my life experience is inherently different than Langston Hughes' was," Mindeman is quick to acknowledge. "One thing I learned from (him), and it's in his poetry: He has profound faith in his own heritage and a devotion to his heritage, and I wanted to respect that.
Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-langston-hughes-20140319,0,5393653.column
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