“Fred Ho’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Chinese America,’ performed…at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater, unspooled to one of the best dance scores to be heard in these parts in recent times….the music was brash yet densely textured and full of witty musical asides. It required—and repaid---close listening.” Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

“[Fred Ho] achieves his cross-cultural goals with skill, grace and humor. The music merges Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus with Chinese instruments and vocal styles from Western opera, Chinese opera, and jazz; for a fusion that never seems forced…Mr. Ho’s act of East-West fusion has an audacious integrity.” Jon Pareles, The New York Times

“[in his 20 year career] the self-taught baritone saxophonist has become a most commanding player and writer.” Bob Blumenthal, The Boston Globe

“At last year’s San Francisco Jazz Festival, Fred Ho wowed the crowd with excerpts from his epic Journey Beyond the West: The New Adventures of Monkey…they rose to give Ho and crew a thunderous ovation…If, as Toni Cade Bambara suggested, the goal of the revolutionary artist is to make revolution irresistible, then Fred Ho has taken a giant step.” Aaron Shuman, Berkeley, CA EXPRESS

Fred Ho is a one-of-a-kind revolutionary Chinese American baritone saxophonist, composer, writer, producer, political activist and leader of the Afro Asian Music Ensemble and the Monkey Orchestra. Writes The New Yorker: “It’s not every day that you run into a musician who joins a protean range of talents…”For two decades, he has innovated an Afro Asian New American Multicultural Music imbedded in the swingest, most soulful and transgressive forms of African American music with the musical influences of Asia and the Pacific Rim. As Larry Birnbaum writes in Down Beat “Fred Ho’s style is a genre onto itself, a pioneering fusion of free-jazz and traditional Chinese music that manages to combine truculence and delicacy with such natural ease that it sounds positively organic.”


Ho is a prodigious composer, having written over a half dozen operas, music/theater epics, cutting edge multimedia performance works, martial arts ballet, and oratorios. In the mid-1980s, Ho created the Asian Pacific American performance art trilogy, Bamboo that Snaps Back, presented at the Whitney Museum, and for which the music/spoken word score was released on Finnadar/WEA records.

Ho wrote the first contemporary Chinese American opera, A Chinaman’s Chance, staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, featuring a bilingual libretto (Chinese and English) and which signaled his ground-breaking combination of traditional Chinese and western instrumentation.

In 1988 he conceived and composed the music/theater epic A Song for Manong as a tribute to Filipino workers.

He composed and created a multimedia bilingual (Spanish and English) oratorio, Turn Pain Into Power! His music/theater/opera/dance-ballet epic Journey Beyond the West: The New Adventures of Monkey was commissioned by the Joseph Papp Public Theater, developed by the Guggenheim Museum Works and Process Series, and presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music 1997 Next Wave Festival.

Joining with librettist Ann T. Greene, Ho created the opera Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Womyn Warriors, commissioned by the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Aaron Davis Hall, the National Endowment for the Arts Opera/Musical Theater program, Dance Theater Workshop and Arizona State University-Tempe and premiered at The Kitchen in NYC. The opera was released as a double CD by Koch Jazz.

In collaboration with librettist Ruth Margraff, Fred Ho created Night Vision: A Third to First World Vampyre Opera, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, was presented at Cooper Union and the HERE Arts Center in NYC, with development by The Joseph Papp Public Theater New Work Now Festival and New York Theater Workshop.

The book and double CD was published/released by Autonomedia and Big Red Media. The Mary Flager Cary Charitable Trust (again!) with the World Music Institute, the New York State Council on the Arts and the John Harms Center for the Arts commissioned the world premiere of Ho’s blockbuster Once Upon a Time in Chinese America…A Martial Arts Ballet and Music/Theater Epic, presented at the Guggenheim Museum, the JVC Jazz Festival, the Seattle International Children’s Festival and the Brooklyn Academy of Music 2001 Next Wave Festival.
The soundtrack is released on the Innova label. Re-titled VOICE OF THE DRAGON: ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINESE AMERICA…THE MARTIAL ARTS EPIC, the show was signed to CAMI (Columbia Artists Management Inc.) for a tour to 33 U.S. cities in 2002-3.

In 2003-4, the Caribbean Cultural Center, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Apollo Theater Foundation, Mutable Music and the New York State Council on the Arts commissioned Fred Ho to compose and conceive the sequel to this highly successful show, Voice of the Dragon 2: Shaolin Secret Stories, which premiered in January 2004 at the world famous Apollo Theater.

The Walker Art Center commissioned in 1999 All Power to the People! The Black Panther Suite with interactive live digital video editing and mixing. The staged production of this work incorporating martial arts choreography as a Black Panther ballet was commissioned by Northeastern University’s Center for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation and premiered in October 2003 in Boston.

In 2005, Ho will premiere his newest opera, Mr. Mystery: The Return of Sun Ra to Planet Earth, commissioned by the Harold Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia with other commissioning partners still in formation.


The Afro Asian Music Ensemble, founded in 1982, has recorded more than ten recordings including a historic first creative DVD, “The Black Panther Suite” on Innova Recordings. The Monkey Orchestra is featured on Monkey: Part One and Monkey: Part Two (Koch Jazz).

Fred Ho has received numerous awards, including the:
McKnight Foundation Composer/ Residency award; four Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Project grants (1999, 1998, 1991, 2002)
two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (Opera/Musical Theater, 1994 and Jazz Composition, 1993)
two New York Foundation for the Arts Music Composition fellowships (1994 and 1989)
a 1988 Duke Ellington Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award from the Black Musicians Conference (the first Asian American to ever receive this)
the 1987 Harvard University Peter Ivers Visiting Artist award, and many others.

He has been a Master Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, an Artist Fellow at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program; resident artist at the Civitelli Ranieri center in Umbria, Italy
and resident scholar and visiting artist at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.


As a life-long activist, Ho helped to found the East Coast Asian Students Union, the Asian American Resource Workshop, the Asian American Arts Allaince, among many others.

Ho co-edited with Ron Sakolsky Sounding Off! Music as Subversion/Resistance/ Revolution (Autonomedia) which won the 1996 American Book Award.
He edits the popular and best-selling annual Sheroes/Womyn Warriors calendar.
He was also lead editor of the anthology Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America (AK Press), considered by many to be a milestone work.

His newest book projects include: Afro/Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans with William Mullen; and his own collection of writings: Wicked Theory/Naked Practice: Collected Essays on Radical Cultural and Political Theory and Love.

Fred Ho resides in Brooklyn, New York.