Although most of us understand music as solely an aural experience, Fred Ho, a composer, social activist, writer, bandleader and saxophonist, believes music is a revolutionary force that has the ability to change our consciousness and challenge our understanding of the world. As leader of the Afro Asian Music Ensemble, Monkey Orchestra, and Green Monster Big Band, Ho has bravely re-imagined a new understanding of genre and sound by fusing free jazz and traditional Chinese music. The results are oftentimes thought-provoking and exhilarating, and most importantly to Ho and his listeners, rooted in the belief that art is revolutionary.
Throughout his early teenage years, Ho struggled with his Asian American identity. Ho says, ” I believed everything about myself being Asian-American was wrong including how I looked, what I ate, everything, my name. I was trying to figure that out. I wanted to assimilate. I wanted to become white and that didn’t seem to be a successful or effective strategy.”
Growing up in Amherst, MA in the 70s, a satellite at that time for the NYC Black Arts movment, Ho was exposed to a systematic analysis of oppression and racism through social activists such as Sonia Sanchez, who started the first Black Studies program at Amherst College, to Diana Ramos the choreographer, to Max Roach the drummer. “The black experience afforded a way for me to systematically understand what I was going through and the music of the time was the revolutionary music of the black arts movement. That music resonated deeply with me,” said Ho. Ho found many similarities between the Asian American experience and the Black American experience and devoted his life to these parallels and the exploration of oppression through his music and writing. Recently the Revivalist sat down with Fred Ho to understand in more detail the connections between revolutionary ideals in both jazz and hip-hop.
The term “jazz” :
“I don’t use the term “jazz” because I consider it a racial slur. Professor Archie Shepp from UMass Amherst asserts and I agree with him, that the word jazz comes from the French verb jaser, which means to chatter nonsensically or gibberish. So from the very beginning, its classification was a form of debasement. So I don’t know what to use other than the music of the African-American tradition.”
What makes jazz revolutionary:
“It’s the music of liberation. It is a music that demands constant change and a ruthless critique and challenge to everything, to its own tradition. That’s why it’s a perpetual avant-garde art form that can re-ified or ossified. That’s the main quality about the music, its ethos or spirit or character. Now the musical components are also revolutionary. It changes everything we understand about music. Our understanding of time, strong beats 1 and 3 become weak beats, weak beats 2 and 4 become strong beats. That’s a paradigmatic shift where the weak become strong. To quote the Bible, “The meek shall inherit the earth.”
What makes jazz politically revolutionary:
“It’s politically revolutionary because it calls for a different kind of consciousness about the world, about self. People talk about the musicians reaching a point where they surrender to the music, meaning they surrender to its fundamental ethos. It is politically revolutionary. Many people have discussed it in its superficial and mechanical role in terms of identification with black pride and black nationalist philosophy and so on and so forth. That’s all fine and valid, but I think it goes much further in the sense that it evokes and demands a new social relationship among artists. There’s no leader or sideman anymore. And with the audience in the sense that, in earlier form of black music the Holy Ghost must descend. It becomes possessional. It becomes shamanic. It becomes a form of ritual transcendence. It’s like voodoo. It needs to occupy the listener and the practitioner and perform a healing function. If it doesn’t, then it’s ineffective. In that sense, it’s very close to pre-colonized African music, which had a far more social role than entertainment or the arts. Music was used in birthing rites. It was used in rites of passage, in any social function, every form of communication. So in that sense, that’s the neo-African continuum.”
Hip hop as a revolutionary art form:
“Hip-hop, like any black American form as long as it stays true to “assassin’s heart making for the killer’s art,” will be innovative and profound but hip-hop like “jazz” has become very assimilated. Its expressions, visual, cultural style, musical have been appropriated. They are used to see McDonalds hamburgers, Coca Cola and Pepsi. So that has deradicalized, denatured, deracinated, depoliticized what had the potential to be a revolutionary expression. It had the potential.”
Relationship between how jazz and hip-hop have developed:
“I mean, everything you can criticize jazz for being in terms of being denatured, deracinated, depoliticized, you can say about hip-hop. You can say about the same. The only thing is hip hop is more en vogue, its more used in terms of mass consumerism. Now there is a whole label put out by Starbucks. So, jazz becomes that kind of safe thing as well but hip-hop is even safer. It has a posture of being youthful though it really isn’t. It’s just as tired, sterile, stiff and square as today’s jazz expressions.”
Should all art be revolutionary:
“All art should be and must be because it makes a better art. The assassin’s heart makes for killers art. It makes for more exciting, innovative, fresh challenging transgressive imaginative expression. If it doesn’t have that heart of an assassin it will be tired, safe, compromised, regurgitative. It might be technically proficient, but it doesn’t have that killer soul in it. Now I’m not espousing violence what I’m espousing is intensity and passion and a go for it all spirit. That’s what makes great art.”
For more information on Fred Ho and his music and writing: http://www.bigredmediainc.com/brmflash/
You can find his albums here.
Interview by Nora Ritchie
