Jazzing Up a Revolution

Fred Ho ’79—baritone saxophonist, composer, band leader, political activist, and Marxist—is a pretty remarkable guy. He aspires to create multicultural and deeply political music by blending avant-garde jazz and African American music with Asian influences, and he actively fuses his roles as an artist and political activist to create a uniquely expressive identity for himself. Last Friday, Ho was honored with the Fall 2009 Harvard Arts Medal, which is awarded by the Office for the Arts to an alumni “who has made a special contribution to the good of the arts, to the public good in relation to the arts, or to education”; on the following evening, Ho played with the Harvard Monday Jazz Band in Lowell Lecture Hall for a premiere performance of his new work “Take the Zen Train.”

Since his beginnings as a self-taught musician, Ho has been pushing the boundaries of jazz, which he calls “quote-unquote jazz,” referencing the term’s origin as a racial slur. He merges African American music with Chinese opera and uses Duke Ellington-style swing in musicals and operas featuring female vampires, mythical monkeys, and now, green earth monsters. His music is arresting, indefinable, and unquestionably dramatic, aggressive in its motifs but always expansive in tone.

For Ho, combining musical messages with social emancipation is a vital part of his identity. Growing up as an Asian American in Amherst, Mass. in the 1960s, he says, “I’d faced racism ever since the day I’d become conscious as a young kid at age three.” “I was hit with the tidal wave of Black Power and the Black Arts movement,” he says of his teenage years. African American music and culture gave him a way to understand his Asian American identity, and he melded together these two influences in his explorations of jazz, which for him represents “the journey of the search for my identity and how we can achieve liberation.”

Liberation is an important concept for Ho; his first original composition to be performed by the Harvard Jazz Bands was “Liberation Genesis,” which he created in 1975 as an already prolific undergraduate musician. It was also during his time at Harvard that he became a Marxist, which he still remains today. “I don’t consider myself a Marxist with a capital ‘M,’” he says. “I believe that it’s not a dogma, it’s not a blueprint; it’s a creative science similar to music.”

At Saturday’s performance, Thomas Everett, Director of Bands at Harvard, paid homage to Ho’s unique sound, likening him to other jazz greats whose personalities and musical voices were inseparable. “You heard one note—Lester Young—and that was his voice,” Everett declared. “I hear the same thing in Fred’s baritone.” Ho’s playing is aggressive, sharp, often filled with wailing shrieks and guttural burps, but it always remains expansive and lyrical. “He can play seven octaves on the bari sax—he can do things with the bari sax that no-one else can do,” says Kristen M. Pagan ’10, who played in the Monday Jazz Band with Ho for “Take the Zen Train.”

According to Everett, Ellington, Charles Mingus and Sun Ra—who all pushed the boundaries of the musical forms they played—have all had some significant influence on Ho. “With Fred, it’s unpredictable. There’s no formula,” Everett says, citing the 11/4 meter in which one of the movements in “Take the Zen Train” is written. But Ho does not only draw on jazz for musical inspiration, he lists his influences as “everything, from Chinese opera to Korean pansori… to TV and movie themes and soundtracks.” He focuses on authenticity in music, claiming, “I have a fairly developed bullshit detector, so I don’t accept anything that is not sincere.” He distinguishes himself from today’s stagnant jazz world, which for him is dominated by “the regurgitators, young people who have tremendous technical proficiency, but no imagination, and worse, no soul.”

“Take the Zen Train” represents a new development in Ho’s philosophy that occurred after he was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2006. His entire approach to music has become part of a much more organic, earth-conscious process, and he is now focusing on a new project, the Green Monster Big Band. “The old Fred Ho that engaged in whatever produced the toxicity that led to my cancer, that path cannot be returned to now. I’m a part-time farmer now, farmer Fred. I’m about four years old now,” he says. He grows his own vegetables and now refers to his music as “revolutionary Earth music—I consider my music to be the music of farmers.” The big band jazz suite in “Take the Zen Train” makes innovative use of modal and blues tonalities, and symbolizes Ho’s desire for thoughtful self-realization and social action.

To produce a truly unconventional piece, Ho worked with director and choreographer Daniel Jáquez (who graduated from the A.R.T. Institute in 2000) and incorporated student dancers into the performance. Jáquez is one of many artists who have been influenced by Ho’s strong personality. He describes the process of choreographing the show as a quest guided by Ho’s desire for liberation. “It wasn’t like each dance was unusual, but we found the bizarreness of the dance in releasing the dancers’ strength, in trying to find new ways of responding to movement,” Jáquez says. Jáquez combined modern dance with hip-hop, classical, and martial arts elements, and his three dancers, painted as green monsters, counterpointed the music with their own flowing narrative.

Ho is hoping to bring “Take the Zen Train” and the Green Monster Big Band to New York venues soon. In the meantime, he is working on getting his Cancer Diaries published, and he continues advocating the lifelong social message he believes in. “It’s a mistake, an illusion to think that art is not political. All art is, even when it professes to not be. Because, even by not being political it simply rubberstamps the status quo,” he explains, adding, “[Art is] a sledgehammer against the façade. It’s a tool to construct a new society, a new reality.”