It's fitting that four-time Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman’s ASK YOUR MAMA will be released by Avie Records exclusively on iTunes (http://smarturl.it/AskYourMama) on July 3, one day short of Independence Day: as icon of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, says in his poem of the same name, “your country is your mama.” With her original musical setting of Hughes's epic work, Karpman, described by Variety Magazine as “one of the most important women in Hollywood,” gives us a true 21st century marriage between her own bold, evocative all-embracing music and technological genius and the lyric legacy of Langston Hughes, the pre-eminent voice of the African-American experience. The cast of legendary performers features sopranos Janai Brugger and Angela Brown, hip-hop innovators The Roots and Medusa, jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon, along with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, conducted by Grammy-nominated George Manahan. The album will be available as a physical, 2-CD set, and on other digital and streaming services on July 10.

Karpman’s panoramic score is the first major vocal setting of Hughes’ most modernist, defiant work, ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 Moods For Jazz. Using Hughes's own voice at its core, the work takes its cue not only from Hughes’s boundary-exploding text, but also from his musical notations in the margins of the poem, suggesting cool jazz, German lieder, patriotic songs, post-bop, spirituals, Arabic and African drumming, and more. Integrating 21st century technology, Karpman brings Hughes’s words to life weaving a compelling tapestry of orchestral music, live singers, spoken word artists, and recorded voices of icons from Louis Armstrong to Leontyne Price to Pigmeat Markham. The result: an exhilarating tapestry of jazz, carnivale, tent revival, opera and poetry slam, as he and Karpman take us on an odyssey from Africa to the Americas, high art to low art, from south to north, from cities to suburbs, from opera to jazz – and in Hughes’ own words, "from shadows to fire.”

Laura Karpman’s ASK YOUR MAMA premiered to a sold-out Carnegie Hall, which also commissioned the work, in 2009 and has since played from Harlem’s Apollo Theater to the Hollywood Bowl.

The multi-faceted Karpman’s recent and upcoming premieres include “Siren Songs” for the Pacific Symphony; “Wilde Tales,” a children’s opera for the Glimmerglass Festival, for which she received an Opera America female composer grant; and a work for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, to be premiered by a nation-wide group of Gay Men’s Choruses. Founder of the recently formed Alliance for Women Film Composers, she’s a professor at UCLA in the School of Theater, Film and Television, she is one of a handful of female composers with an active career in film and television, not only winning four Emmys, but also receiving an additional seven nominations, as well as an Annie Award nomination, two G.A.N.G awards and two G.A.N.G award nominations for her video game music.

Ask Your Mama is available from iTunes at http://smarturl.it/AskYourMama

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