Ben Barson and Royal Hartigan, with Hafez Modirzadeh: September 4, 2014

The Poetry Center presents musicians Ben Barson and Royal Hartigan, visiting the Bay Area to celebrate the life and legacy of musician, composer, bandleader and political activist Fred Ho. The two musicians are joined by Hafez Modirzadeh, from the School of Music at San Francisco State, on saxophone.

Throughout the mostly improvised jazz sets, the three musicians discuss Ho's life, his activism, organizing, political and philosophical understanding and interpretation of music and jazz, as well as their own individual times and experiences with Ho, and the things he taught them.

The trio also include the audience at multiple points: taking and responding to questions, playing together while students recite their own poetry, and accompanying Steve Dickison and Modirzadeh reading Fred Ho's poem "Vincent Chin: A Success Story, A Fable." 

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
Date
2014-09-04
Event Run Time
01:37:40
Contributors
Steve Dickison
Demarion Gipson
Lisa Raskin
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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Ben Barson, Royal Hartigan, Hafez Modirzadeh (01:26:52)

The performance begins with Ben Barson and Royal Hartigan's rendition of "The Underground Railroad To My Heart," an "anti-bourgeois boogie-woogie" composed by Fred Ho. Hartigan explains how sections of the piece had to be shortened, mended, and improvized to fit the performance. He then describes meeting Fred Ho, their early time together, Ho's views on jazz and music, and how he sought to cultivate Afro-Asian culture.

Barson and Hafez Modirzadeh then follow up in conversation, leading to a reminiscing on Ho's life, his activism and organizing, and a historical dive into the founding of the Black Panther Party, followed by "Serve the People, Organize the People, All Power to the People," performed by all three men.

Barson, Hartigan, and Modirzadeh perform improvised pieces with several student audience members who read their own works.

A guest from the audience, who'd been a student of Diane Fujino and met Fred Ho during his guest-teaching at UC Santa Barbara, makes a considered intervention expanding on Hartigan's telling of the incident of Vincent Chin's murder in Detroit in 1982, and emphasizes Chin's resistance and the pan-Asian response to that brutality. "Vincent Chin: A Success Story, A Fable," a poem written by Fred Ho, is then read by Steve Dickison and Modirzadeh as the duo accompany them. The duo performs one final improvized piece, and continue talking, before concluding the event.

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