• Track Listing

29 track collection of classic material by Langston Hughes, a key innovator, novelist, playwright and poet whose best-known work sparked the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring the super rare 'Weary Blues' album where Hughes' incisive poetry was set to music by Leonard Feather's All-Star Sextet and Charles Mingus and the Horace Parlan Quintet from two late 1950s sessions. An early conceptual piece, the Weary Blues highlighted New York life in Harlem at the end of the '50s painting a vivid story in words and also some fine jazz playing. The set also features Hughes' spoken word versions of some of the tracks along with other socially-charged pieces including the influential "I Have Known Rivers," which has been interpreted by jazz and soul exponents on many occasions since, as well as Hughes' recollections of bars and boulevards and the emotive study of "dark" America on the poignant "I Too." Finally, the collection closes with two Hughes interpretations by Bob Dorough with the Bob Dorough Quintet from the similarly rare vinyl album 'Jazz Canto Volume 1.' Remastered with sleeve notes by MOJO magazine's Dave Henderson.