Fred Ho / “I’m most comfortable nude. I’m talking with you on the phone nude,” says Fred Ho. If any other person I’d never met before had said this, I might have been alarmed. But not so much coming from a pioneering activist and musician. “I don’t do any press photos anymore without me being nude. I believe in being raw. The concept of raw-ism is a revolutionary concept,” Ho continues.

Indeed, the posters advertising Ho’s upcoming musical performances and lectures show him in his natural state, sporting only a pair of cowboy boots emblazoned with black panthers. His baritone saxophone, oh-so-strategically placed, acts as an assertion of Asian American masculinity. Ho most likely won’t perform nude this time around.

But he puts this out there: “If a concert venue or hall would permit it, I would happily do it.”

Detaching himself from the industrialized world. Farming his own food in a socialist garden. Continuing to create Asian American jazz-fusion music and revolutionary writing on Afro-Asian politics. These are the results of decades of activism. Like many Asian American activists coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Ho says, “I found my identity through black culture.”

Models of organization and empowerment from the civil rights era, as well as expression through jazz music (Ho uses the term “jazz” in quotation marks because he says the term is a racial slur) inspired other marginalized groups to find their voices in the struggle for equal rights. Ho has not forgotten these ties and tries to enlighten the younger generation about the connection, both through lectures and music.

How is his music a blend of Asian, Asian American and black sensibilities? After first asserting that “authentic musical culture is truly black,” Ho explains, “To be simplistic, I’ll lay Asian folk songs as standard repertoire and play with an African American blues sensibility. Unlike academia, ‘how’ is not a verbalized explanation. It’s much more existential, it’s experience.”

When asked if the younger generation of scholars and activists has forgotten about the Afro-Asian political connection, Ho says, “Young people need to become organizers, but there’s no need to become organizers in nonprofits. They need to become independent and self-sufficient. The Third World Movement was co-opted. People became nonprofits within the domestic or went to the IMF or World Bank in the international realm.”

His other opinions, such as activist scholars in academia “are prisoners of the matrix,” are enough to make the current and recent generation of ethnic studies scholars and activists feel ashamed for not being more radical.

As if Ho wasn’t already off the grid enough, his battle with cancer since 2006 has added complexity to his fight against injustice, capitalism and other facets of the industrialized world that are harmful to people physically, spiritually and mentally.

His new book, Diary of a Radical Cancer Warrior: Fighting Cancer and Capitalism at the Cellular Level, is still in need of a publisher. His most recent published works are 2009‘s Wicked Theory, Naked Practice and this year’s album Celestial Green Monster.

Are you ready to get your mind blown? Your clothes can stay on if you’re not feeling revolutionary enough.

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