Baritone saxophonist, composer, writer, political activist, and leader of both the Afro Asian Mujsic Ensemble and The Monkey Orchestra, Fred Ho is one of today's leading Asian American artistic talents. As a composer and performer, Ho works at the edge of forms, masterfully combining folk music elements from Asia and the Pacific Islands within a 20th century African American context that is deeply influenced by Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Cal Massey. The result is an elaborate, yet fiercely swinging and soulful music, visonary in it's embrace of a 21st century American multi-culturalism, which is "neither easily pigeonholed nor easily ignored." (The Washington Post). "This is a music which is at once highly social, political and above all swings with great feeling".The Chicago Observer comments, "It is a statement tha music can address our social ills and still be uplifting."
Ho wrote the first contemporary Chinese American opera, A Chinaman's Chance,which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This work, based obn a bilingual libretto (Chinese and English), signaled this groundbreaking combination of traditional Chinese and Western instruments. His music theater work, A Song For Manong: Part III of Bamboo That Snaps Back,was premiered by Life on the Water at San Francisco's Herbst Theater. A tribute to the struggles of Filipino immigrant laborers in the United States, it combines indigenous kulintang music and dance with contemporary African American music. His multimedia bilingual (English and Spanish) oratorio, Turn Pain Into Power, written in collaboration with Alma Villegas and Esther Ivarem, was acclaimed by The Washington Post as "charged with such anger, longing, affirmation and beauty that it almost defied the listener to turn away..."The Journey Beyond The West: The New Adventures of Monkey!, a musical theater adventure based on the popular Chinese trickster, Monkey, received a concert concert performance by The Monkey Orchestra at the Joseph Papp Public Theater.
In 1998 Fred Ho and librettist Ann T. Greene received a major commission from the Mary Flagier Cary Trust and Aaron Davis Hall/City College of New York to compose the 3-act opera Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Womyn Warriors -- an Afro/Asian fantasy-action opera.
The Afro Asian Music Ensemble, a group Ho founded in 1982, was first featured in Tomorrow Is Now!,a Soul Note release voted Best Large Ensemble Album of 1986 by the Chicago Observer. "Although just a sextet, the ensemble often sounds twice that size," wrote the Washington Post., "as it combined passages of brash, daring, visceral jazz with a multi-cultural tapestry of melodies, textures, and rhythms." The group's second album, We Refuse to be Used and Abused,were voted Village Voice Critic's Choice of the Decade. The Underground Railroad to My Heart, released by Soul Note, was voted one of the best albums of 1994 by the Village voice. Koch Jazz released Monkey: Part One (1996) andMonkey: Part Two(1997) featuring the Monkey Orchestra. In 1997 O.O. Discs released Turn Pain Into Power!performed by the Afro Asian Music Ensemble.
A long-time activist in the Asian American community, Ho helped found the East Coast Asian Student Union, the Asian American Resource Workshop, AsianImprov Records, the Asian American Arts Alliance, and many other organizations as well as cultural and political projects. He has lectured extensively in iniversity and colleges across the country and has published many articles and essays on music and social change, revolutionary polical and cultural theory, Asian American history politicas and culture.
Ho has co-edited a book Sounding Off! Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution (Autonomedia), which was selected by the Before Columbus foundation as the 1996 winner of the 17th annual American Book Awards.
Fred Ho fax: 718 832.1825
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