Judith Humenick. Photo credit: Marjan Tropper
JUDITH HUMENICK is a Canadian artist manager and consultant, and is also involved in jazz education as founder and Executive Director of JazzWorks Canada, an Ottawa-based jazz education organization. Her promotion, the Langston Hughes Project, won the 2016 JazzFM Award for Live Experience of the Year. Interview by Sandra Marcy:
Sandra Marcy: You presented the Langston Hughes Project (LHP) Ask Your Mama -12 Moods for Jazz at London Jazz Festival which won Jazz FM's Live Experience of the Year 2016. How did it come about?
Judith Humenick: The Project, a multimedia concert performance of Hughes' kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite, is Hughes's homage in verse and music to the struggle for artistic and social freedom in the United States and abroad at the beginning of the 1960s. The twelve-part epic poem, which Hughes himself scored with a wide variety of musical cues drawn from as many as 12 different jazz and blues related styles plus German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming, remained unperformed at his death.
It’s a multi-media work that involves narration by a spoken word artist and originally composed music with jazz quartet (based on Hughes’ cues) set to a visual background of images from the Harlem Renaissance, and it all occurs simultaneously. The show originated as a Black History Month project/event over 15 years ago, and it was so well received that performances of the work have continued for college audiences across the US ever since. While Ron McCurdy has been performing and perfecting the LHP presentation over a number of years, the original collaboration with spoken word artist rapper/actor Ice T took place in 2008, with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.
read more at: http://www.londonjazznews.com/2017/03/interview-judith-humenick-iwd2017.html
0 Comments:
Post a Comment