Hear something new with Afro Yaqui Music Collective
When it comes to musical innovation, the late Chinese-American composer and baritone saxophonist Fred Ho was willing to go where no one had gone before.
“I played in his band, and we did a ‘martial arts opera,'” his protégé Ben Barson recalled. “It was a jazz band playing behind these guys doing martial arts. We also had a koto, a Japanese instrument, and went between Japanese folk music and jazz and funk. I never would have imagined, as a jazz musician, that you could do something like that.”
Gizelxanath Rodriguez peforms at the Kennedy Center.
Barson brings a similar sense of adventurous to his own music and to the band he co-leads with his wife, Gizelxanath Rodriguez: the Afro Yaqui Music Collective, which will perform during the Mt. Lebanon Artists’ Market Party, scheduled from 6 to 9 p.m. Sept. 22 in the Uptown’s Clearview Commons.
“Fred had a band called the Afro Asian Music Ensemble, and thought, we don’t want to redo what Fred did,” Barson said. “We want to do something new.”
His band’s name incorporates “Yaqui” in honor of Gizelxanath’s heritage. Organized into autonomous, yet unified, cultural and military groups in the pre-Columbian era, the Yaquis fought off subjugation well into the 20th century.
And so the Afro Yaqui Music Collective combines elements of African, Asian and American and Mexican Indian music with more familiar genres.
“We love funk. We love rock. We’re not trying to turn anyone away,” Barson explained. “We’re just trying to take what they already know and implement it in a new way.”
Ho (1957-2014) no doubt would have approved.
Ben Barson performs at the Kennedy Center.
Like his mentor, Barson is a baritone saxophonist, and Afro Yaqui Music Collective also features the alto and tenor versions of the horn. Gizelxanath sings – she’s operatically trained – and plays cello, and other instruments include guitar, bass, keyboards and percussion.
Another is the pipa, a four-string instrument of Chinese origin.
“It has a huge range,” Barson said. “Sometimes it can sound like a banjo. Sometimes it sounds like a harp. Sometimes it sounds like a guitar. It really has a lot of sounds in it.”
Yang Jin, who will perform at 2 p.m. Sept. 23 at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s main branch in Oakland, plays pipa with the collective on some occasions. For others is New York City-based Min Xiaofen, who performed with the group for its April 4 concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
The opportunity came with Barson being awarded the 2018 Johnny Mandel Prize in composition by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. The Afro Yaqui Music Collective is scheduled to return to the prestigious venue on Nov. 23.