Events Calendar

The World of FRED HO

Presented by Jazz Program
Location: Lowell Lecture Hall
17 Kirkland Street, Cambridge

Tickets on Sale: 10/15/2009

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“Fred Ho achieves his cross-cultural goals with skill, grace and humor. The music merges Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus with Chinese instruments and vocal styles from Western opera, Chinese opera, and jazz; for a fusion that never seems forced...Mr. Ho’s act of East-West fusion has an audacious integrity.” (Jon Pareles, The New York Times) 2009-10 Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Fred Ho ’79 will be in residence during the fall term to rehearse and perform with the Harvard Jazz Bands, and participate in other events to be announced. Joining Ho will be choreographer Daniel Jáquez, the co-founder and Artistic Director of Calpulli Mexican Dance Company as well as an Associate Artist at the Miracle Theatre in Portland, Oregon and at The Immediate Theater in New York. Jáquez earned an MFA in Directing from the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard.

Fred Ho is a one-of-a-kind revolutionary Chinese American baritone saxophonist, composer, writer, producer, political activist and leader of several music ensembles. For two decades, he has innovated a new American Multicultural Music embedded in the swingingest, most soulful and transgressive forms of African American music with the influences of Asia and the Pacific Rim. As Larry Birnbaum writes in Down Beat, “Fred Ho's style is a genre unto itself, a pioneering fusion of free-jazz and traditional Chinese music that manages to combine truculence and delicacy with such natural ease that it sounds positively organic.”

Ho is a prodigious composer whose output of multimedia pieces, scores and oratorios includes the nationally toured and celebrated “Voice of the Dragon”; Josephine Baker’s “Angels from the Rainbow for Imani Winds: Suite for Matriarchal Shaman Warriors” (for percussion ensemble IIIZ+); music/theater project “Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armageddon! (a martial arts sword epic paying homage to manga and samurai film classics), and the opera “Mr. Mystery: The Return of Sun Ra to Save Planet Earth” with libretto by Quincy Troupe and “Dragon vs. Eagle” for the Apollo Theater and Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival. He received a Jazz Commissioning Award from Chamber Music America to compose “Suite Sam Furnace” and has been awarded numerous other grants and commissions to present his vision of music and the arts from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Apollo Theater Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, NY State Council on the Arts, Chamber Music America and World Music Institute.

As a musical leader, Fred Ho has recorded more than fifteen albums and founded the Afro Asian Music Ensemble in 1982 and Monkey Orchestra in 1990, co-founded the Brooklyn Sax Quartet with David Bindmanin in 1997, and Caliente! Circle Around the Sun (with poets Magdalena Gomez and Raul Salinas), among others.

He has published several books including his newest “Wicked Theory, Naked Practice,” a groundbreaking collection of his writings, speeches and interviews from the past 30 years. Fred Ho has been the subject of several scholarly works, while his other distinctions include a 1996 American Book Award and becoming the youngest person to receive the Duke Ellington Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award. He currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.