Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble make CU debut Friday

Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble

Listeners have waited for over a year to hear Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble, as they were originally scheduled to play here in March 2000. On April 20 at 8 p.m., Ho and the ensemble present a free concert, "We Refuse to Be Used and Abused," sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program, Department of Music, American Studies Program, College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell Council for the Arts, Dean of Students Office and the Society for the Humanities.

Baritone saxophonist, composer, writer, political activist and leader of both the Afro Asian Music Ensemble and the Journey Be
yond The West Orchestra, Ho is one of today's leading Asian American artistic talents. As a composer and performer, Ho works at the edge of forms, masterfully combining folk music elements from Asia and the Pacific Islands within a 20th-century African American context deeply influenced by Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Cal Massey. The result is an elaborate yet fiercely swinging and soulful music, visionary in its embrace of a 21st-century American multiculturalism, which, according to The Washington Post, "is neither easily pigeonholed nor easily ignored."