Pass Blog

Fred Ho: August 10 1957 – April 12 2014. Rest in Power

Gwen Ansell and Salim Washington celebrate the revolutionary life, language and hard-ass leadership of an unconventional saxophonist, composer and generous collaborator.

On stage or record, female musicians and performers featured in the line-up. As a writer and editor, Ho valued ‘first voice’, so in the books women speak for themselves and their own self-selected images were seen. For a couple of years, from 1998, Ho edited the Calendar of Sheroes and Womyn Warriors. All the works are often searing in their honest naming of abuse, but defiance, strength and hope also resound: ‘The blues is not about sorrow, but about hope.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1j6hUJZKzQ

Slow blues: From a whisper to a shout

Racially bullied at school, Ho read the autobiography of Malcolm X and joined (and left) the Nation of Islam before he entered Harvard. There, he joined the radical Asian- American organisation, I Wor Kuen, which later became the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS). He described moving from nationalism toward Marxism as Harvard taught him ‘what I did not want to become… part of the elite’, and as he and his comrades saw the interconnectedness of all struggles. That was an era when many radical organisations argued that national and gender struggles should be mentioned softly, subordinated to the bigger battle; either the revolution would solve them, or they could be dealt with ‘later’. That’s not Ho’s position today. There is space on his pages and in his grooves for Chicanindio poet and activist Raul Salinas, feminist writer Christine Stark, African-American saxophone colossus Sam Furnace, Persian-American vocalist Haleh Abghari, and too many more to number. The battlement-shaking shout of protest in his work is made up of diverse voices, each confident in its identity, all hollering together.

The diversity of militant voices in Ho’s work owes much of its inspiration to the Black Arts Movement (BAM), which flourished between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. For cultural workers around BAM, art was a powerful tool for social change. To enhance its punch, inspiration was drawn from multiple sources, and art forms and codes of expression – words, images, sounds – were integrated and deployed in iconoclastic ways.

Intermezzo: wooden-fish chant.

Buddhist monks used hollow fish-shaped wooden blocks to strike rhythm while chanting the sutras. The practice was adopted by Taoism and much later fed into the Gold Mountain lyrics: workers’ songs by Chinese immigrants to America. By legend, the fish never sleeps: it’s all about wakefulness and so is Fred Ho’s work. Political, academic and mass-media hegemonies have rendered words like ‘struggle’ and ‘revolution’ unfashionable even when they are the most useful words for certain realities. They have buried the histories of militants, such as jazz trumpeter and composer Cal Massey, inside whose music ‘one could hear the Black Panthers marching’. Ho tells it like it is, restoring memory, replacing linguistic fashion with revolutionary style, waking up our ears and tongues again to the discourse of change

This is an excerpt from Gwen Ansell and Salim Washington’s story, originally published in the April 2013 edition of the Chronic.

To read the article in full, get a copy in our online shop (paper or PDF) or visit your nearest dealer.