Yellow Power, Yellow Soul

The Radical Art of Fred Ho

Roger N. Buckley, Tamara Roberts, Roger N. Buckley, Tamara Roberts

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252094705
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This dynamic collection explores the life, work, and persona of saxophonist Fred Ho, an unabashedly revolutionary artist whose illuminating and daring work redefines the relationship between art and politics. Scholars, artists, and friends give their unique takes on Ho's career, articulating his artistic contributions, their joint projects, and personal stories. Exploring his musical and theatrical work, his political theory and activism, and his personal life as it relates to politics, Yellow Power, Yellow Soul offers an intimate appreciation of Fred Ho's irrepressible and truly original creative spirit. Contributors are Roger N. Buckley, Peggy Myo-Young Choy, Jayne Cortez, Kevin Fellezs, Diane C. Fujino, Magdalena Gómez, Richard Hamasaki, Esther Iverem, Robert Kocik, Genny Lim, Ruth Margraff, Bill V. Mullen, Tamara Roberts, Arthur J. Sabatini, Kalamu ya Salaam, Miyoshi Smith, Arthur Song, and Salim Washington.

PART I

Revolution in Music

IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN

Only the drums
And yells of yay!

Only the drums
And yells of yay!

Because we are alive in this place.
Because we grew up on Now-or-Laters,
Candy necklaces and Cocoa Puffs
And we are still here.

Here to bear witness, to stomp, holler, love, scream
To declare that it remains to be seen, to fight.

Surely Bush and his crew are no worse than McKinley and his crew
And my people survived!
Surely Colin Powell and Condi Rice are not worse
Than Booker T. and Stepin Fetchit.
And my people survived!

Surely the latest no-lye relaxer and hair weave
Are not worse than the conk, process or hard press.
And my people survived!

Bring my armor
Fuse with me the collective spine
Of Middle Passage bones
Raising from the ocean bottom.

Bring conga, djembe, kalimba, steel pan.
The deepest well pitch of Paul Robeson,
The most makes-you-cry note of Marvin Gaye,
Bring big pots of black-eyed peas, injections of melanin
Bring the mass choir from Mississippi
Mahatma Ghandi's prayerful walk
But don't forget Harriet Tubman's pistol!

Because the polar caps are melting now
And our farms are nearly all gone.
They put pig genes in our collards and tomatoes.
Horse piss into our wombs.
Smallpox, anthrax and Ritalin in our veins.
And, into our hands, either a rifle, a corporate card
Or some license to entertain.

Only the drums
and yells of yay!

Only the drums
and yells of yay!

Because I am here
in this place.
Because we are here

Because we—who weren't supposed to be…anything
From North Philly, the South Side, Southeast, and Compton—
Have survived Nixon's forehead, Reagan cheese,
The Bushman's smartbombs and now
The Bushmaster's do-it-yourself terror.
Survived cordons of gangs, crack, crackheads
And our cut buddies turned predators and capitalist tool.

Only the drums
And yells of yay!
Because I am here, alive
In this place
Because we are here
And we weren't supposed to be…anything

Go on—take me to the river.
Go on—take it to the bridge!

Because Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Cheney and Rove
Are on the loose! Trying to code my life in orange, red and yellow alerts.

Wanting me to be afraid as I peer at the TV screen
Exploding with lies and myth.

And my people have survived!

Because the polar caps are melting now
And our farms are nearly all gone.
They put pig genes in our collards and tomatoes.
Horse piss into our wombs.
Smallpox, Anthrax and Ritalin in our veins.
And, into our hands, either a rifle, a corporate card
Or some license to entertain.

C'mon. Bring conga, djembe, kalimba, steel pan.
Make thunder.
Go on—take me to the river.
Go on—take it to the bridge!
Because we have survived
And we are here,
In this place all bathed and in our armor.

And ready.

—Esther Iverem

1

Enter the Voice of the Dragon

Fred Ho, Bruce Lee, and the Popular Avant-Garde

KEVIN FELLEZS

I am trying to create a new American opera that appeals to today's youth—particularly inner city youth—who think of opera as something conservative and exclusionary […] I at least want my artistic/theatrical concept to be more exciting and captivating, and for the martial arts to demolish the aesthetics of grade-B action films, boring Broadway and moribund modern dance.

—FRED HO, “Beyond Asian American Jazz”

I believe that I have a role […] the audience needs to be educated and the one to educate them has to be somebody who is responsible. We are dealing with the masses and we have to create something that will get through to them. We have to educate them step by step.

—BRUCE LEE, Words of the Dragon

Fred Ho's Journey beyond the West: The New Adventures of Monkey (1996) is an “Afro Asian score for ballet,” an eclectic brew of high and low culture, as well as Afrodiasporic and Asian American cultural elements. Journey beyond the West is a reinterpretation of popular Chinese Monkey King tales, a figure who protects the lowly and oppressed from evil spirits and the caprices of the gods. As Susan Asai notes, “Within the socialist framework of Ho's politics, The Monkey King can be thought of as the equivalent of a working-class hero defying the capitalist, bourgeois forces that oppress the masses.”¹ Through all of his works Ho has built an aesthetic informed by political histories as well as his insistence on the efficacy of music to serve as a revolutionary tool of “the people.”

It is not only Chinese mythology that inspires him. In the composition, “Monkey Decides to Return Home ‘To Right the Great Wrongs’” from Journey, Ho's voicings for the horns recall Chinese opera themes, assisted in no small part by the use of instrumentation borrowed from Chinese operatic ensembles. Another work, Voice of the Dragon: Once upon a Time in Chinese America (1997), is a reinvention of ancient Chinese myths, the Chinese martial-arts tradition and its popular-culture form, the martial-arts action film, as well as Asian and Afrodiasporic musical influences Ho describes as “Afro-Asian new American multicultural music.”² We can hear this merging of political acumen and musical hybridity throughout his work.

His work is thus positioned in “already hybrid” spaces complicated by his use of elements gleaned from popular culture. Understanding his own work as operating within a tradition he terms the “popular avant-garde,” his use of popular-culture elements is both aesthetic strategy and political advocacy. Defining the popular avant-garde as an aesthetic program dedicated to “elevating standards, promoting the necessity and importance of experimentation but at the same time being rooted, grounded and vibrantly connected to the people,” Ho castigates accessibility in art as a needless “dumbing down, a pandering” to popular audiences.³ He is also wary of various connotations of “avant-garde” because “it can be both purveyor of change or perpetuator of privilege, solipsism and snobbish elitism [particularly if it implies] the completely anti-political position of l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake, which I and others would assert, is political by asserting the autonomy of art and ideas as standing above society and thereby tacit acquiescence and accommodation to the status quo).”⁴

While Ho's work operates within a context of an historical Asian American jazz movement and its set of political commitments, I pursue a slightly different tack in this chapter, focusing on Ho's articulation of a popular avant-garde. A key element of his aesthetic that has been largely overlooked is the martial-arts film and, in particular, the philosophical texts (films and writings) of actor Bruce Lee as a way of representing Asian American struggles for recognition, thinking about Asian American sources of spiritual knowledge and aesthetic sensibilities, and as an example of the contradictory impulses Ho gathers together in the creation of the popular avant-garde.

In ways similar to the journey hua pen narratives took to become valorized as literati cultural production, Ho appropriates the work of Bruce Lee and the marital-arts action-film genre in the creation of his popular avant-garde in order to educate his audiences, provide models of revolutionary and liberatory political action, and to give voice to counterhegemonic perspectives. Because engendering a revolutionary consciousness in his audiences remains Ho's primary goal, not merely entertaining them with high-concept spectacle (though he assuredly accomplishes that, as well), his creative work remains rooted in a dialectics of education and entertainment, popularity and populism, and tradition and innovation. Through his engagement of the martial arts action film genre, Ho also taps into a longer historical continuum that stretches back to Ming era literature. As Bruce Lee asserted, “In fact tradition is nothing but a formula laid down by experience. As we progress and time changes, it is necessary to reform this formula…box-office success is a formula, but will I forget my food and sleep for this dead formula? I, Bruce Lee, am a man who never follows those fearful formulas.”⁵ Fred Ho is also a man who has chosen to “not forget his food and sleep for a dead formula,” forging instead his own unique aesthetic.

Music, Manga…

Antonio Gramsci understood “the popular” as a locus of intersecting interests, rhetorics, and representations, a space of both conformity and opposition to elite culture.⁶ Similarly recognizing popular culture's hybrid nature, yielding both conservative as well as radical energies, Ho channels his creativity into recognizable forms he can then implode from within, challenging audiences’ expectations even as they are entertained. Because Ho's extravagant creativity and unapologetic embrace of consumer cultural signs occurs in tandem with his stated agenda of revolutionary creative production, he interrogates popular culture's commodification of creative work through a provocative set of inquiries into the meanings of various idioms, traditions and cultural hierarchies, especially as he points to “the people” for their tastes and legitimation. For example, Ho's admiration for Lone Wolf and Cub, a manga (Japanese comic book) and the movie series it inspired, is not only to participate in otaku (manga and anime fan) culture but is also an expression of his political and cultural solidarity with popular audiences.⁷

Ho has written about his idea of revolutionary art and its relation to popular culture, setting a four-point agenda—speak to the people, go to the people, involve the people, and change the people—and emphasizing the need to engage popular audiences, not as an effort to merchandise his art more effectively or to lessen the political impact of his art, but to increase the effectiveness of his creative work in creating a revolutionary consciousness in his audiences.⁸ His views echo those of Angela Davis, who has argued that “as Marx and Engels long ago observed, art is a form of social consciousness—a special form of social consciousness that can potentially awaken an urge in those affected by it to creatively transform their oppressive environments. Art can function as a sensitizer and a catalyst, propelling people toward involvement in organized movements seeking to effect radical social change. Art is special because of its ability to influence feelings as well as knowledge.”⁹ Ho's idea of a popular avant-garde is fundamentally anchored to Davis's idea of popular culture engagement as a means to motivate audiences to question normative assumptions and ideologies.

Ho has been working toward this idea of the popular avant-garde for most of his career. Indeed, decades before he explicitly theorized the popular avant-garde, he looked to some of the most popular forms of jazz in order to drive his aesthetic, with a special attentiveness to the transcultural orientation jazz has long offered the perceptive listener. A robust muscularity energizes Ho's creative energies, and his hypnotic cover of Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol's “Caravan,” a composition whose title speaks to cross-cultural exchange and whose dominant modal flavor connects jazz to non-Western musical traditions, speaks directly to a legacy of a “popular avant-garde” in jazz. Ably demonstrating his sympathies and abilities within a jazz tradition, Ho's arrangement of the song from The Underground Railroad to My Heart (Soul Note, 1990) highlights the centrality of cross-cultural fusions in Afrodiasporic music and, in particular, within jazz.¹⁰

The political tenor of jazz artists such as Charles Mingus, Max Roach, or Archie Shepp, who drew equally from the past as well as from their own individual musical aesthetics, were models for Ho's own developing sense of purpose for his music.¹¹ But it is not only African American precedents Ho recognizes. He cites earlier Asian American cultural expression, writing, “Other early Asian American folk cultural forms include oral tradition of folk stories, ballads, chants and folk songs brought over by the early Asian laborers from their peasant oral traditions.” Importantly, “the great body of the Asian American cultural tradition emanates from the working class Asian communities and is [created and performed in] the Asian languages and dialects.”¹² In fact, early Asian American folk culture was shaped by the structural racism Asians faced, and their poetry, music, and other cultural activities expressed their “feelings and experiences of separation, loneliness, disappointment, bitterness, pain, anger and struggle.”¹³ He has also detailed the musical and political histories of an earlier generation of Asian American musicians such as Frank Chin and his group, A Grain of Sand, as well as the folk rock group, Yokohama, California.¹⁴ Ho has tapped into these reserves of Asian American culture in forming his Afro Asian new American multi-cultural music, the musical component of his popular avant-garde.

As ethnomusicologist Wei-hua Zhang observes, “Diversity is [one] of Ho's musical qualities. He likes to synthesize different musical styles and genres and mold them. His expanding use of elements from a variety of musics such as West African, Latin, reggae rhythms, Filipino kulintang, Chinese and Korean instruments, Arabic and Japanese modes, has become characteristic of his compositions. Almost all of his works are marked by multiple sections and changing meters and moods.”¹⁵ More importantly to this chapter, the development of Ho's multicultural music increasingly took shape as not only Asian instrumentation and musical aesthetics were blended with Afrodiasporic musical traditions, particularly jazz and rhythm ’n’ blues, but took place in conjunction with his idea of the popular avant-garde, utilizing links to Asia that were not bound to the high art cultural traditions such as Japanese Noh or Chinese Peking Opera, but to popular culture forms such as manga and samurai and kung fu film genres.

…and Martial Arts

Ho's interest in cultivating a youth audience partially motivated his incorporation of the martial-arts action film, a genre he once found demeaning for its depiction of Asian males as cold-blooded asexual killing machines—a representation of Asian masculinity Ho described as nonhuman at its most basic level.¹⁶ However, Ho was admonished by black Cherokee activist Day Star to recognize the martial arts as part of his tradition and to not allow how it had been “appropriated and misrepresented [in films] influence you because then you're just reacting to it. Take it back! Make it something revolutionary.”¹⁷ Her advice forced him to recognize the liberatory possibilities of the martial arts and, by extens...