The Lunar New Year begins on Feb. 1, ushering in celebrations around the world. We're now entering the Year of the Tiger — a sign of the zodiac known for strength, self-confidence and courage, and for a crusading sense of justice.
All of these traits could be said to describe Fred Ho, the trailblazing baritone saxophonist, composer-bandleader and social activist who died in 2014, at 56. A few years before he passed, Ho had released an album titled Year of the Tiger, featuring his Green Monster Big Band. Issued on the Innova label in 2011, it's worth revisiting today.
Ho himself was born in the Year of the Rooster, lest we confuse this artistic statement for some form of autobiography. What he set out to accomplish with Year of the Tiger was a big band opus with a characteristic blur of reference points: Duke Ellington, always a touchstone for him, brushes up against Jimi Hendrix (whose "Fire" and "Purple Haze" both come in for reinvention) and Michael Jackson (who inspires a three-part composition titled "Very, Very Baad!"). Ho even invokes the Hanna-Barbera cartoon hero Johnny Quest, whose TV theme song serves as the album's overture.
But the heart of Year of the Tiger is a six-part suite that Ho titled "Take the Zen Train." Commissioned by the Office of the Arts at Harvard, it's a stunning example of his orchestral language, which triangulates the styles of Ellington, Charles Mingus and a raucous, post-1960s avant-garde. Consider the soul cry of the Green Monster saxophone section in the suite's fifth movement, "Quarantine for the Aggressor."
Last May, in observance of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we devoted an episode of Jazz United to the Asian American experience in improvised music. Part of my preparatory research focused on Ho's music and legacy, and in particular a searching essay, "Beyond Asian American Jazz," that he wrote in 1999.
Among other things, the piece is a personal history marking Ho's deliberate effort to situate his own cultural experience within a lexicon of Black American music. He writes about pivoting from an "Asian American jazz" model toward something he called "Afro Asian new American multicultural music." Radical politics were a part of this calculation; so was a rejection of the reactionary conservatism he associated with "jazz." In this sense, it seems fitting to celebrate Ho's vision on a day that marks both the start of the Lunar New Year and the first day of Black History Month.
And the "Take the Zen Train" suite concludes with a piece that clearly puts theory into practice. "Beyond the Beyond" opens with a plaintive four-note motif, carried over from the previous movement and opened up with a plunger-muted bleating of horns. A minute and a half in, the piece reaches a logical end point — but then lurches into a breakneck double time. While the album was released in 2011, it was actually recorded back in 2004. So when you hear the unmistakable timbre of Mary Halvorson's guitar on this track, you should know that it predates the dawn of her own solo career.
Among the other musicians on Year of the Tiger are cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, pianist Art Hirahara, tenor saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh, and trumpeter Amir ElSaffar. These and countless other artists have drawn sustenance from Ho's self-sufficient example.
Just a couple of months before he died, of complications from colorectal cancer, Ho spoke with Kat Chow of NPR's Code Switch about the poignancy of his situation. "What devastates me the most," he said, "is the loss of what future joys and discovery might have happened if I didn't die so young."
As we celebrate the Year of the Tiger, we'd do well to revisit Ho's work; Year of the Tiger, by Fred Ho's Green Monster Big Band, is available on Innova Records.
