New and vibrant artistic sounds and visions, an expansion of civil rights, and a celebration of the new and the next in Black culture all converged in 1920s and ’30s New York City as the Harlem Renaissance. This incredible creative movement will be revisited on a local stage this week, with a new production of Orlando-born stage musical Lenox Ave.
Written and composed by Brandon Martin, an Orlando resident but a New York native, Lenox Ave tells the story of Langston Hughes, famed writer, social activist and early innovator of jazz poetry. Inspired by Hughes’ first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, Martin took some of these poems and put them to new music inspired by the African diaspora.
“We go from jazz to some hip-hop, to some kind of rock, blues, calypso. It’s a little bit of everything,” Martin tells Orlando Weekly. “What came out of the Harlem Renaissance, which really was an explosion of Black art and culture.”…