The Langston Project is a quartet where musical inventiveness meets the poems of the late great American writer Langston Hughes. It is the combination of creative music with ambitious songwriting. The poems by Langston Hughes are set to music in precise song forms that allow the four musicians room for interpretation and improvisation. Langston Hughes' poems call for swinging and grooving music and for the blues – the more or less abstract blues, “contemporary blues” as Luc calls it.

The arrival of Debbie Cameron in the quartet in the spring of 2014 brought a strong jazz and soul feel as well as a deep American pronunciation that fits Langston Hughes' poems perfectly. The interplay between this rich world and the more experimental temperaments of Poulsen, Ex, and Sanders gives a fresh and grooving music on the edge between tradition and invention.

If one word could pin-point Langston Hughes' poems, it would be “desire”: Desire for artistic expression, desire for writing, desire for justice and equality, the ambition and desire of people, the desire for dignity and above all the desire of love, for love, in love. Desire.

langstonproject.com 
soundcloud.com/hasse-poulsen/sets/the-langston-project