Word: musics
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...