Date: April, 2013
Venue: Charles H. Knox Gallery (Harlem, NY)

Text and photos by Don Chow

Which award-winning baritone saxophonist is also a Chinese-American, self-proclaimed matriarchal Marxist revolutionary?

There is only one answer, of course, and he is Brooklyn’s Fred Ho– a bona fide icon of Asian-American jazz, who has been waging a ‘scorched earth’ war with cancer since 2006. I remember corresponding with Fred about possible gigs while I was living and working in China, having invited him to Vancouver a few years earlier for an Asian-Canadian music series. But Fred suddenly stopped emailing and later I found out about his illness.

Fast forward to 2013 in Harlem where I manage to time another trip to NYC with one of Fred’s limited public appearances. At Knox Gallery, sculptor Leah Poller is unveiling a bronze bust of Fred as the centrepiece of her solo exhibition which also includes a second room dedicated to Fred’s collection of clothes he has designed for himself. On sale and display are also a selection of the many CD’s he has produced and books he has authored or edited- truly a model for the self-made artist!

I first became aware of the Asian-American jazz movement in the late 1980’s after a jazz festival performance by Jon Jang and the Pan-Asian Arkestra along with an article in Coda magazine documenting the scene then emerging from the San Francisco Bay area.  Following up on a clue on the back of a hard-to-find LP on Atlantic, Bamboo That Snaps Back, I tracked down Fred’s number from a Chinatown community association and met up with him in New York around 1993. He was a seriously hard-nosed activist then as now and, while he has naturally mellowed a bit over the years, his commitment to music and politics has been singularly unwavering.

The Knox Gallery opening includes a book signing a few days later for an anthology dedicated to Fred’s work aptly titled Yellow Power, Yellow Soul accompanied musically by a group led by Fred’s very earnest student Ben Barson. Over the course of two days, the steady stream of visitors includes legendary Blue Note recording artist Bobbi Humphrey, hard at work promoting an upcoming performance.

Yet a question on the lips, perhaps, of an elephant in the room: where is the Asian-American audience for this work? Hopefully there was more of a presence at Fred’s performance at the Museum of Chinese in America on April 25th, by which time I had left New York. Time may tell.