FRED HO
ABOUT THE ARTIST/BIOGRAPHY
Baritone saxophonist, composer, writer, political activist, and leader of both The Afro Asian Music Ensemble and The Journey Beyond The West Orchestra, Fred Ho is one of today's leading Asian American artistic talents. As a composer and performer, Ho works at the edge of forms, masterfully combining folk music elements from Asia and the Pacific Islands within a 20th-century African American context deeply influenced by Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Cal Massey. The result is an elaborate, yet fiercely swinging and soulful music, visionary in its embrace of a 21st-century American multiculturalism, which "is neither easily pigeonholed nor easily ignored." (The Washington Post). "This is a music which is at once highly social, political and above all swings with great feeling," The Chicago Observer comments. "It is a statement that music can address our social ills and still be uplifting."
Fred Ho has received several prestigious awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (Opera-Musical Theater in 1994 and Music Composition in 1993), a 1994 and 1989 New York Foundation for the Arts Music Composition Fellowship, and a 1988 Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award given by the 17th Annual Black Musicians conference at the University of Massachusetts. He is also the recipient of a 1987 Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Fellowship at Harvard University and several ASCAP and Meet the Composer grants.
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LINKS
http://www.bigredmediainc.com/brmflash/
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Fred Ho and The Green Monster Big Band - Celestial Green MonsterOn Celestial Green Monster, Fred Ho and the Green Monster Big Band - assembled from Ho¹s favorite musicians with whom he had the pleasure and honor to work with since embarking upon a professional career in music in the 1980s - perform both original compositions by Ho (Liberation Genesis; Blues to the Freedom Fighters; The Struggle for a New World Suite) as well as arrangements of two pop culture classics (Spiderman Theme; In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida). |
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Fred Ho and the Saxophone Liberation Front - Snake-Eaters"...its disciplined/riotous sound suggests that he's not only still going after a long bout with cancer, but is still going strong." Mike Heffley, Signal to Noise
Darker than Blue, inspired by Curtis Mayfield's song, We the People Who are Darker than Blue, employs shifting meters (including a blues section in 11/8 and 11.5 /8), 12-tone serialism, compound meter ostinati, and Lydian chromatic approaches to orchestration. |
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Fred Ho And The Green Monster Big Band / The Sweet Science Suite: A Scientific Soul Music Honoring Of Muhammad Ali"Ho’s arrangements are as outstanding and unique as Ali’s boxing style." Ken Waxman, JazzWord
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FRED HO & QUINCY SAUL present The Music of Cal Massey: A Tribute"What Fred Ho has done with his orchestra here is quite remarkable— the first recording ever of Massey’s 1970 10-movement “The Black Liberation Movement Suite” to which updates were made in 1986 by Romulus Franceschini." - J. S., Buffalo News
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