Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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?...
...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...
...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?...