Jazz this week: The Langston Hughes Project; Julian Lage; Hamiet Bluiett's Big Orchestra Band, Youth Division; Orange CD release; and more

This week's jazz and creative music offerings in St. Louis are a varied lot, from a multimedia project with an historical focus to a concert featuring a 50-piece band of students playing the compositions of one of St. Louis' greatest living jazz musicians, plus lots more. Let's go to the highlights...

Tonight, trumpeter Ron McCurdy brings his multimedia presentation The Langston Hughes Project to SIUE's Meridian Ballroom. For much more about this musical look at the jazz-influenced poet, author and essayist, check out last Saturday's Video Showcase post.

Also tonight, the Jazz at Holmes series at Washington University resumes after spring break with a free concert from guitarist Vince Varvel's trio; and singer Kim Massie performs at the Sheldon Concert Hall to benefit the March of Dimes.

On Friday, the talented young guitarist Julian Lage and his group will be in town for one night only to play at Jazz at the Bistro. Jazz St. Louis is offering a 2-for-1 discount on tickets for Lage's performances; you can find out more about that offer, and hear some samples from his new CD here.

Also on Friday, saxophonist Kendrick Smith and his quartet will take the stage at Robbie's House of Jazz, and songwriter Al Hammerman will present a benefit concert for the Make A Wish Foundation at the Sheldon. Although not a jazz performer in the strict sense, Hammerman clearly has been influenced by the Great American Songbook, and typically deploys a number of local jazz players to help realize his compositions. Friday's concert will include vocals from Debby Lennon and Alan Ox, among others, and a 12-piece band playing arrangements of Hammerman's original songs.

On Saturday afternoon, the great baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett (pictured) will unveil his latest project The Big Orchestra Band, Youth Division in a concert for the Nu-Art Series at Metropolitan Gallery. The 50-piece ensemble is made up of kids participating in school and community center music programs in St. Louis City, St. Louis County and East St. Louis, and they'll perform new arrangements of some of Bluiett's compositions.

That evening, the group Orange will celebrate the release of their first CD at Jazz at the Bistro. Together now for a couple of years, Orange is essentially a busman's holiday for members of singer Erin Bode's band - pianist Adam Maness, bassist Syd Rodway, and drummer Mark Colenburg - plus vibraphonist Peter Schlamb. (Steve Davis will fill in on Saturday for Colenburg, who's on the road with pianist Robert Glasper.)

Their eponymous self-released CD features seven of Maness' original compositions, plus one from Schlamb. You can read more about it in Terry Perkins' article for the St. Louis Beacon here, and check out samples from the CD on Orange's Facebook page.

The busman's holiday will be short-lived, however, as Maness, Rodway & co. will be back at work Sunday evening, accompanying Erin Bode in a concert at Chapel of the Cross Lutheran Church in St. Peters to benefit Peace Lutheran Church and the Ablaze Center in Riverview, MO.

Looking beyond the weekend, on Monday guitarist Tom Byrne's trio is playing at BB's Jazz, Blues and Soups; and guitarist Dave Black and others have put together a homecoming celebration for vibraphonist Lee Roth at Pop's Blue Moon on the Hill. Roth, who worked with a number of local jazz groups from the late 1970s to the 1990s, is back in town for a few days, and musicians, especially those who might have known him back in the day, are encouraged to bring their instruments and take part in a jam session.

For more jazz-related events in St. Louis this weekend and beyond, please visit the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar, which can be found on the left sidebar of the site or by clicking here. You also can keep up with all the latest news by following St. Louis Jazz Notes on Twitter at http://twitter.com/StLJazzNotes or clicking the "Like" icon on the StLJN Facebook page.

(If you have calendar items, band schedule information, news tips, links, or anything else you think may be of interest to StLJN's readers, please email the information to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you have photos, MP3s or other digital files, please send links, not attachments.)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: The Langston Hughes Project

Today, we turn our video spotlight on The Langston Hughes Project, a multi-media setting of Hughes' 1961 poem “Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz” that will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 24 at the Meridian Ballroom on the campus of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville under the auspices of SIUE's Arts And Issues series.

Led by trumpeter and jazz educator Ron McCurdy, the project combines a reading of Hughes' 12-part poetic suite with live music from McCurdy's quintet and projected images of the Harlem Renaissance by African American artists and photographers including Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks and Romare Bearden. Hughes originally had intended to collaborate with bassist Charles Mingus on a musical score for "Ask Your Mama," but died in 1967 before the project could be developed.

Four decades later, McCurdy and Dr. John Wright of the University of Minnesota expanded on Hughes’ original concept by adding the visuals, and since then, The Langston Hughes Project has been performed by McCurdy and Wright all around the country. The chairman of jazz studies and professor of music at the University of Southern California, McCurdy also has performed with jazz artists such as Joe Williams, Arturo Sandoval, Maynard Ferguson, Lionel Hampton and Dianne Reeves and with pop singers including Rosemary Clooney and Leslie Uggams.

Up above, you can see a brief video trailer that introduces The Langston Hughes Project. Down below, you can see and hear performances of the first section "Cultural Exchange" and the sixth, "Horn of Plenty." The fourth video is an excerpt from the piece's world premiere in 2008, a big-budget extravaganza that featured an orchestral score written by McCurdy and performed by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra as well as rapper/actor Ice-T reading Hughes' words.

Though he's most often associated with Harlem, Hughes (1902-1967) actually was a Missouri native. He was born in Joplin, grew up in Lawrence KS and Cleveland OH, and moved to New York as a young man just in time to be part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. An avid jazz and blues fan, Hughes enjoyed sitting in clubs listening to music and writing poetry, and he was quite a prolific writer. His works include writing sixteen books of poems, two novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of fiction, and twenty plays, plus children's poetry, musicals and operas, three autobiographies, a dozen radio and television scripts, and dozens of magazine articles and essays, as well as editing seven anthologies.

For more about Hughes' life and work, check out these two short bios of him. You can read a selection of his poems here, and hear him reading his own work in a 1945 audio recording posted to YouTube in four parts (1, 2, 3, 4). Hughes also was recorded reading "Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods For Jazz" in 1967 for an album called The Black Verse. Although the LP is out of print, you can hear those recordings (interspersed with a variety of jazz cuts) on this program paying tribute to Hughes that aired earlier this year on KDVS, a public radio station associated with the University of California-Davis.