Fred Houn, The Afro-Asian Music Ensemble

CD version. We Refuse To Be Used And Abused is the second album Fred Houn made for Soul Note with The Afro-Asian Music Ensemble, the band the baritone saxophonist had founded in 1982. It followed Tomorrow Is Now!, his first Soul Note album, from 1985. It was recorded in Milan in November 1987; in 1988, the year it came out, he legally changed his surname to Ho. The record makes its politics explicit in its titles: a requiem suite for Paul Robeson, a suite for the struggle of workers, a piece called We Just Want To Be Free. It is a sextet of three reed players, piano, bass and percussion, mostly composed and arranged by Houn himself.

The session took place at Barigozzi Studio on November 26 and 27, 1987, with Giancarlo Barigozzi as engineer and Giovanni Bonandrini producing. Houn plays baritone and soprano saxophone and flute, Sam Furnace alto and soprano saxophone and flute, Hafez Modirzadeh (credited as Hafez Modir) tenor saxophone and flute. Jon Jang is at the piano, Kiyoto Fujiwara on bass and Royal Hartigan on percussion, including a donno talking drum. The opening Never Broken, Always Outspoken, The People Are Me is a suite of almost twelve minutes subtitled as a requiem for Robeson. Shiranui, by Akira Ohmori, runs over nine minutes, and When The Sun Rises The Guava Turns Red is a traditional melody kept under three. The Unity!, the suite dedicated to workers, carries the album title as its subtitle, and the closing Kimochi is subtitled Community Spirit. The CD booklet carries liner notes by Brian Auerbach, a cover by Juan Sanchez and a back cover photograph by Ken Shung.

This is the Soul Note CD 121167-2, the compact disc edition issued in 1988 alongside the original LP, with the six pieces in their original order.