Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader (review)

Fred Ho is an important Asian American voice. I first interviewed Ho in the mid-1980s for my own work on Asian American music, and in 1996 invited him to come to Northeastern University as a resident artist. As one of the most politically active Asian American artists, Ho smashes the stereotype of passivity many attribute to Asians and Asian Americans. He cuts quite a figure with his hair fashioned in a stylized Mohawk and dressed in unique outfits, which he himself designs and sews. The impact Ho has on anyone who meets him is not only in how he presents himself, but how he articulates his radical ideas and speaks of the connection between his music and the revolutionary struggles of oppressed peoples.

As a baritone saxophonist, composer/arranger, bandleader, writer, political activist, and producer, the word prolific comes to mind. Ho has led six different music ensembles, composed 25 commissions, recorded 15 albums (as leader), received numerous composition fellowships and awards, including a Duke Ellington Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award, coedited three books, published numerous articles, completed 16 artist residencies, and lectured widely at universities and colleges across the country. His work in Asian American communities and with Asian American student organizations speaks to his activism as well. Ho is a dynamic spokesperson for a generation of Asian Americans whose continued marginalization is addressed in his forceful writings, lectures, and speeches that politically analyze current conditions and exhort revolutionary action.

Ho forged his radical political ideas and Asian American identity when the Black Liberation Movement and the Black Arts Movement were at their height in the late 1960s and 1970s. Born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, Ho’s contact with poet Sonia Sanchez and saxophonist/bandleader Archie Shepp at the University of Massachusetts ignited Ho’s early development as a Marxist-Leninist. Malcolm X, the vision of African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral, and the boundary-breaking music of John Coltrane all fueled Ho’s ideological development and his move toward cultural nationalism and “a return to the source,” that is, returning to one’s roots as a means to bring about social change.

Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader is a compilation of selected published articles, lectures, and other works written by Ho between 1984 and 2006. The book’s foreword, introduction, and afterword contextualize well Ho’s activities as an activist artist and political analyst who constantly pushes the boundaries of revolutionary creative expression. The foreword by Asian American scholar Diane C. Fujino offers the reader a succinct biography of Ho and his ideological and artistic development both as a political activist and cultural worker in the march toward revolutionary change. Fujino captures well the uniqueness of this controversial figure whose marginality both within the academy and the music industry allows him to maintain his radical stance against the changing politics around him.

The book is divided into four sections that begin with a chronology of Ho’s ideological and musical growth within the context of the Asian American political movement and the rise of Asian American jazz-based music. In the second section, Ho identifies with the revolutionary qualities of African American music genres—jazz, blues, swing—emphasizing the freeing of time, pitch, and harmony in this music that symbolizes a quest for freedom and an oppositional stance toward the oppression of African Americans in the United States and more broadly all oppressed nationalities around the globe. He associates the aesthetic, spiritual, and ethical features of African American music as an expression of the indomitable human spirit. Ho then segues into considering musical borrowings, appropriations, and cross-fertilizations of 1960s free jazz, rock, and pop with musical traditions from around the world as indicative of power relations between hegemonic forces and colonized, marginalized...