I made the mistake, on my pool entry, of identifying Fred Ho as a jazz saxophonist. Turns out he objected to the term "jazz" on the grounds that it was originally used pejoratively to denigrate the music of African Americans (someone notify the queers).

 

He was also a composer, writer, and radical activist. He fought cancer and capitalism in the same breath, blaming the former on the latter. Rejecting consumerism—he never owned a car and famously made his own clothes from kimono material—he preferred to subsist on university residencies and institutional grants.

 

He considered himself a "popular avant-gardist," but I can't think of anything more clichéd (and arguably less popular) than putting cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal—a veritable poster child of the left—on your album cover, flanked by Mao and Malcolm X.

 

I'll stick with Kenny G.

 

Nonetheless, we were kindred spirits, both preferring to work solo. To invoke another cliché, I'll take the points.

--Gerard Tierney