STRUGGLE FOR A NEW WORLD! Fred Ho Memorial Tribute: September 7, 2014

The Poetry Center played a supplementary role together with multiple musicians, activists, and organizations including Asian Improv aRts, Freedom Archives, the Design Center for Global Needs at SF State, and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, in organizing and presenting STRUGGLE FOR A NEW WORLD! a Memorial Tribute to Fred Ho. Fred Wei-han Ho (August 10, 1957–April 12, 2014) was a renowned baritone saxophonist, composer, bandleader, playwright, writer, and eco-socialist-feminist activist and organizer. Based for much of his professional life in New York City, Ho forged long-standing working relationships with musicians and comrades in the Bay Area, joining in the creation of crucial Asian American interventions into the continuum of African American creative music, and a politics foregrounding social and racial justice, health, and "matriarchal socialism."

Some forty musicians, writers, scholars, and artists join forces for this memorial tribute, performing Fred Ho's music and other works in tribute, with his family, friends, and interested public in attendance, filling the Oakland Asian Cultural Center in downtown Oakland for the length of a Sunday afternoon. Smaller assemblies of some of the same artists took place earlier the same week, at Freedom Archives on Valencia Street in San Francisco's Mission District, and at The Poetry Center, at San Francisco State University.

Fred Ho, with his signature baritone saxophone, appeared on two dates at The Poetry Center, performing as a member in the Brooklyn Sax Quartet, with poetic texts featured by Ho, and on another visit while touring with poets raúlrsalinas, of Austin, Texas, and Magdalena Gomez, of New York City.

Recommended: Diane Fujino's contemporaneous tribute, "Fred Ho's Radical Imagination," at the Asian American Writers' Workshop, October 17, 2014, with many related pieces by, for, and about Fred Ho, his life and work, at the same website.

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
Oakland Asian Cultural Center, Oakland
Date
2014-09-07
Event Run Time
02:52:15
Contributors
Winston Byrd
Ricardo Gomes
Claude Marks
Matef Harmachis
Diane Fujino
Larry Ochs
Steve Adams
Jon Raskin
Bruce Ackley
Rova Saxophone Quartet
Ijeoma Thomas
Genny Lim
Marty Wehner
Masaru Koga
John-Carlos Perea
Hafez Modirzadeh
Akira Tana
Jon Jang
Royal Hartigan
Ben Barson
Francis Wong
Alleluia Panis
Fred Wei-han Ho
Oluyemi Thomas
Flora Houn Hopkins
Florence Houn
Frances Liu Houn
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Fred Ho Memorial Tribute (02:51:51)

The program opens with an invocation by dancer Alleluia Panis, accompanied by Francis Wong, tenor saxophone. Co-emcee for the program, Black Studies scholar Matef Harmachis, alternates with Black and Asian Studies scholar Diane Fujino, presenting introductions and remarks at intervals throughout the near three-hour span of performances and tributes.

Following a three-flute rendition (John-Carlos Perea, Hafez Modirzadeh, Masaru Koga) of "We Shall Overcome," Fred Ho's mother and two sisters address the audience, remembering their son and brother, from his life as a child and young man to his fierce commitment as an artist and political activist to his final struggle with colon cancer. 

Modirzadeh and Wong improvise a saxophone duo. Genny Lim performs a poem, "Jeet Kune Do," named for Bruce Lee's personal expression of martial arts — translated as "way of the intercepting fist," a practice of "fighting without fighting," or "swimming on dry land" — with Barson and Akira Tana accompanying; Koga, Perea, and Modirzadeh join Lim for her second poem ("The distance between Gaza and Ferguson is only two degrees....").

Tana joins in a percussion duo with Hartigan, then Hartigan reads "a poem inspired by the Hopi people," titled "From Fred Ho, to Us," with Koga and Tana accompanying. [64 min mark]

(to be completed)

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