Frenzy in the Night is about growing up black and male in America, finding your own voice and becoming an artist, the pain of racism, and the dream of freedom. It is a spiritual quest for cultural and personal affirmation. A poetic suite in three parts, it traverses the American landscape from the "banks of the muddy Mississippi" of Mason's St. Louis boyhood, through a mythical "free state of Illinois," to his artistic coming of age in the "boom box of L.A." Mason's provocative, emotionally charged text is set in Apple's lush cinematic sonic landscape of West African tribal drums and wailing jazz saxophones, riverboats, police sirens, street rappers, birds, all caught in the ebb and flow of the river that is replaced by the freeway, as it travels from a bittersweet blues in the night to an urban frenzy. Commissioned by New American Radio.