The Weary Blues Jazz & Poetry Concert by Langston Hughes & Charles Mingus

304 South Elgin Avenue,Tulsa OK 74120

23 April, 2023

Description

Weary Blues (also referred to as The Weary Blues) is an album by the American poet Langston Hughes, who recites several of his poems over jazz accompaniment composed and arranged by Leonard Feather and Charles Mingus. The album was recorded on March 17 & 18, 1958 in New York and was released on the MGM label in 1959. It was later reissued on Verve Records. Performed by Quraysh Ali Lansana & some of Oklahoma's best jazz musicians. This event is in partnership with Tulsa Jazz, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and Tri-City Collective, Inc. Trombone-Naomi Wharry Trumpet--Damian Rozell Keys----Cole Cribbs Bass-Dean Demerritt Tenor Sax: Tommy Poole Drums-George Toumayan Guitar--Nathan Pape Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of twenty books in poetry, nonfiction and children’s literature. Lansana is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow a Lecturer in English at the University of Tulsa, and a Lecturer in Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa where he also served as Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation. Lansana is Executive Producer of KOSU/NPR’s Focus: Black Oklahoma monthly radio program, which is a recipient of a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award, a 2022 NAACP Image Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists Award and was a Peabody Award nominee. Lansana is also the recipient of a 2022 Emmy Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Award and a 2022 National Educational Telecommunications Association Public Media Award for his roles as host and consultant for the OETA (PBS) documentary film “Tulsa Race Massacre: 100 Years Later.” Lansana is a three-time International Regional Magazine Award-winning Contributing Editor for Oklahoma Today magazine. A former faculty member of both the Writing Program of the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago
and the Drama Division of
The Juilliard School, Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center
for Black Literature and
Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2012 and was Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing there until 2014. His most recent books include Opal’s Greenwood Oasis, the skin of dreams: new and collected poems, 1995-2018, The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience & Change Agent) and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop. Forthcoming titles include Killing the Negative: A Poetic Intervention, with Joel Daniel Phillips, a children’s biography of Ralph Ellison, and a series of books on the Black Rodeo. Lansana’s work appears in Best American Poetry 2019. He is a founding member of Tri-City Collective and serves on the Board of Directors of the Philbrook Museum of Art and Oklahoma Humanities, is a Curatorial Scholar for The Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art and a Curatorial Board Co-Chair for the Ragdale Foundation. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and a member of the first cohort of the Culture of Health Leadership for Racial Healing Fellowship.