Yo! Ho Chi Minh is in the House!: Reflections on Jazz and the Vietnam War

by Patrick Preziosi

For the last two years of the United States’s public military involvement in Vietnam, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy and his quintet––Steve Potts on alto and soprano sax, Irene Aebi on vocals and violin, Kent Carter on bass and Oliver Johnson on drums––played a 30 minute suite titled The Woe on their seemingly endless performance schedule. The Woe was recorded and broadcast live by Zurich Radio throughout Switzerland in 1972. This was the final ever performance of The Woe, and in his liner notes, Lacy writes: “I have no idea what the reaction was, if any.”

The Woe made its radio debut on January 26th. On the 27th, the Paris Peace Accords were signed. As America once again prepared to anoint themselves nominal arbiters of peace, Lacy and his group ripped through an intro, two extended pieces and a coda, their strident melodicism augmented here by two cassettes of “war noises (air and ground)”. A strange sliver of irony burrows itself further into the proceedings, in that the only takers for this confrontational piece of jazz/sound-art were the mightily militarized “neutral” Swiss. There exists little, if any, contemporaneous writing on this performance, which went largely unheard until paired with Crops (a Lacy solo concert recorded at L’Eglise St. Jean L’Evangeliste in Montreal in 1976) by Quark Records & Books in 1979, which was then still a very limited release. In 2026, you can’t stream The Woe, nor can you find it on YouTube. It surfaced most recently as appended to unreleased and rare ensemble and solo sessions by Lacy and crew compiled on CD by the British label Emanem in 1995 and 2012. 

Lacy was an incredibly prolific musician. For even the most committed of fans, new ensemble formations, solo ventures, partnerships, and labels seem to be continually manifesting, even 22 years after his death. Collating and cataloguing his music would probably be the life’s work of the most passionate of archivists. It’s not entirely unsurprising that The Woe isn’t top of the list for streamable dissemination during this last decade’s reissue craze, but its brief lifespan also runs counter to Lacy’s tireless, career-long reworking of his own compositions (as well of those of one Thelonious Monk). The Woe went out on the Zurich airwaves and that was that. 

Lacy spoke of the toll it took on him and his musicians to play The Woe. It’s almost as if various strains of manmade sounds are competing with one another: Lacy’s band and their music, and the noise of American warfare, screaming tracer bullets and air-raid sirens. Uneager to return to the piece, it also didn’t evolve into any sort of seminal protest song. In 1969, with rock and roll already a monolithic cultural force, Creedence Clear Water Revival released “Fortunate Son”, King Crimson let out the scream of the “21st Century Schizoid Man” and The Rolling Stones pleaded “Gimme Shelter”. However, Lacy at least had the advantage of not playing the kind of music that became bastardized by all upholders of jingoism, like Creedence’s song being reappropriated for a military recruitment ad. If nothing else, The Woe asserts the agency of its players amidst a perpetual American campaign of commodification, militarization, and an unholy marriage of the two. 

“The Wax” is the suite’s opening salvo, before the monstrous “The Wage”, wherein the band is submerged in those “war noises (air and ground)”, doing their best to scream their way out, and ultimately failing to do so. The proportion of soundbites of violence to actual music may scan as fairly uncomplicated––the band was just playing along to two cassettes on boomboxes in-studio––but that doesn’t account for the actual listening experience, where there is no solid ground, and Aebi’s violin and Johnson’s drums find strange, discomfiting kinships with the tape noise. The confrontational qualities are easy to assume, though difficult to endure. “The Wane” shuffles in with some melody, announcing itself with an ascending whistled tone from Lacy, one that sounds as if it’s echoing through rubble and destruction (more than anything, actually, I think of the lonesome whistle of the Jets in West Side Story (1961) that travels through the remains of San Juan Hill.) 

“The Wake” closes The Woe with instrumental unresolve, but Aebi reads a poem by the French poet Eugène Guillevic, a beautifully utilitarian artist, one whose writing had a geometric slant that didn’t preclude a deeper, accessible emotion, much like Lacy himself. In the notes of the Quark release, Lacy dedicates The Woe to “Ho Chi Minh and all the people of Vietnam.” His jazz-musique concrète superimposition doesn’t exactly “swing” but it is full-bodied, physical and emotive, and thankfully, doesn’t confuse individual catharsis for progress, just as it telegraphed lasting unease rather than closure on Zurich Radio the night before “peace” was declared. 

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Jazz fandom was a badge of honor for the white intelligentsia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the advent of rock music coincided with the swelling counterculture, and was primed to be both radio-friendly and socially conscious. The divisive matter of “respectability” in jazz steered younger naysayers towards other genres, and by 1969, many musicians were expatriating themselves overseas, woodshedding in New York’s loft spaces, or turning towards more reliable jobs in music education. And of course, many Black jazz musicians were drafted into the military. Certain American jazz musicians who explicitly acknowledged the war in their music could only do so retroactively, as they were conscripted to service (saxophonist Henry Threadgill, violinist Billy Bang); others correctly saw the protracted fallout as bridging immediately into the already foreseeable ills of the 1970s (Revolutionary Ensemble); certain records, like pianist Stanley Cowell’s Blues for the Viet Cong, emerged almost covertly from the entrenched bureaucracy of international record labels and their subsidiaries; and some, like (the white) Lacy, were true itinerants, recording and performing wherever and whatever they could at any time, regardless of audience. 

Musicians like Threadgill, cornetist-composer-conductor Butch Morris and saxophonist Frank Lowe were actively pursuing music before they were shipped out. In fact, Threadgill, originally lucky enough to make it into a stateside army band, was a victim of retaliation: asked to compose a piece to present to visiting high ranking officers, Threadgill indulged a proclivity for dissonance and interpolation, and was promptly assigned to combat when one sergeant vocally objected to his Stravinsky-inspired music in the middle of the ceremony. He’d later bring together military ceremony with portents of death in a satirical cover image for his 1987 album Easily Slip Into Another World, wherein Threadgill stands in an enveloping celestial light, as a black-gloved hand from just out of frame pins another medal to his already decorated chest. 

Bang’s story was different. While growing up in the Bronx, Bang had a passing relationship with the violin at school, but wasn’t given much of a chance to continue as his education progressed; and when he turned 18, he was drafted. Lest one assume too romantic an idea of a future musician trying to survive in Vietnam, here’s Bang in an interview with Frank Jung, after asking if he thought about music while a soldier: “Oh, music wasn’t even near me. The only thing I heard of music was once in a while, I heard a Vietnamese song in the background. I just heard the music of automatic weapon fire and the syncopation of mortars being hit and things like that.” A far cry from someone like Threadgill, who found himself in the war because of music, continued to play in a band in Vietnam, and sought out records by the likes of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman as best he could, with a few other Black soldiers in his company. 

Returning to New York, music still wasn’t near Bang, until he decided to buy a violin from a pawn shop down south, on a trip to procure firearms with a small underground group he had casually enlisted with. “I felt like a lost person,” said Bang in that same interview, speaking about his return home. But now reacquainted with the violin, “I couldn’t stop [Vietnam] from my dreams, but I could do something in real life.”

Bang recorded prolifically from the mid-70s onwards, but the thematic burden of the war was more auxiliary, like projecting photos he took while in Vietnam during his live sets (as he shares in Ebba Jahn’s documentary, Rising Tones Cross (1985)). Reasonably reticent about stirring up the repressed memories of those times––he was a “tunnel rat”, after all––Bang nevertheless agreed to record Vietnam: The Aftermath, as encouraged by his label boss at Justin Time, Jean-Pierre Leduc.

The Aftermath was released in 2001, and its followup, Vietnam: Reflections came in 2005. The mid-size ensembles Bang put together for both records were populated with fellow Vietnam survivors (Threadgill, Frank Lowe, Ted Daniel, Butch Morris), hard-bop luminaries (James Spaulding) and, on Reflections, U.S.-based Vietnamese musicians (Co Boi Nguyen and Nhan Thanh Ngo). Both records are surprisingly warm, with The Aftermath settled comfortably in post-bop territory, while Reflections is positively stately at moments, especially when Bang’s violin communes with Ngo’s đàn tranh on the selections from the traditional Vietnamese songbook. The players reflect Bang’s chosen playing style, whether it’s the plangeant sweep of his bow on “Yo! Ho Chi Minh is in the House” or finger-popping pizzicato paired with the clarion, folkloric vocalwork of Nguyen.

The music of Bang’s two Vietnam albums don’t announce some grand shift in sound, nor do they significantly ratchet up the ambition of an already ambitious artist. A generous collaborator, Bang had that particular skill of a Duke Ellington or a Charles Mingus to hone in an instrumentalist’s personal sound and bring it to the forefront; what makes him different than those two aforementioned giants is that he is leading his ensembles with a violin, not exactly the most foundational of jazz instruments (especially when compared to piano or bass). The higher frequencies of Bang’s violin strings necessitate a certain self-effacement when leading larger groups. Such collectivism is apparent from his avant-orchestral Outline No. 12 (1983), through duo projects like Bangception (1982) with Denis Charles, and up to his Vietnam albums. Thinking of this discography as a flowing whole reveals that memories of Vietnam were subsumed within Bang’s larger musical palette, and were already integral to his project, even if they were unspoken, and perhaps even only subconsciously deployed. The modest peeling back of repressive layers of The Aftermath and Reflections charges the records with poignancy, and gives explicit acknowledgement and acceptance to a lifetime of artful protest. 

The Revolutionary Ensemble, the democratic trio of violinist Leroy Jenkins, bassist Sirone and percussionist Jerome Cooper, started gigging together around New York in 1970, playing the respectable jazz venues like the Five Spot as much as they were those decisively non-commercial outposts, like the Public Theater and Ornette Coleman’s Artists House at 131 Prince Street. After two years without any recorded output, Sirone brought a tape recording of a Revolutionary Ensemble performance at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery to Bernard Stollman, the eager if flighty founder of the historic ESP-Disk. The serpentine 47-minute composition was split between two sides of vinyl with the title Vietnam. 

The straightforwardness of the album title opens up the music beyond the boots-on-the-ground specifics of Billy Bang, or the more abstract homage of Stanley Cowell. The Revolutionary Ensemble’s ferociously singular makeup brings the war home, in a sense. The sawtooth violin of Jenkins––occasionally underserved by the church’s acoustics, but aurally potent nevertheless––will engage in (Mississippi) Delta blues, while Sirone’s bass roars like a bass-drum filtered through a distortion pedal; Cooper is the accents-artist, tagging sections with fills before this winding composition continues on its way. The submerged melodicism and the roughneck, pulsating rhythm suggests one witnessing atrocities of war from a distance, beyond some unbreachable barrier. Vietnam is the sound of these three musicians doing their best to scale that impasse, to better comprehend the imperialist horrors of the war from their New York homebase. 

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The seeds of post-’68, revised countercultarlism––both explicitly political and in the milquetoast “abstract”––blew through the New York (and New York expat) avant-garde as the Vietnam war floundered and flamed on, but jazz’s already tenuous relationship with racialized monoculture was deprioritized to boost new strains of (white) experimentation. The music of popular rebellion was rock, and later punk, and formal performance spaces were reserved for the likes of John Cage and his acolytes, who also laid claim to much of the adulatory real estate in The Village Voice. As trombonist, electronics-artist and scholar George E. Lewis makes plain in his A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, contemporaneous reviews of Cage “happenings” and the like were more insider reports by related composers than actual pieces of criticism. Lewis tracks the compartmentalization of this new music under the headers of Downtown I and Downtown II; II demarcates itself with “their putative post-Cage commonality.” Lewis continues, “[b]oth Downtown I and Downtown II are generally racially coded in press accounts as white, and by the late 1980s, such accounts routinely portrayed Downtown II as the logical successor to Downtown I’s connection with pan-European high culture.”

Jazz ran counter to New York’s perpetual annexation of its resident artforms. Interdisciplinarianism is more a mythical, retroactive idealization of the time than it was a common practice. Once matters of funding, quality of living, media representation and press notices are investigated, a clunky redlining of class and race as applied to music emerges. It’s painfully bureaucratic, following the prevailing prerequisites for jazz and its offshoots: if it aspires to be classical it must be formalized, and formalization excludes it from its political import (of countless musicians undoubtedly possessed), and should political import even be asked of something that was once the nation’s most popular music, and classical music’s popularity didn’t wind its way down economic-classes the way jazz has, and so on and so forth. 

There were pockets of stability for jazz musicians in the protean cultural rush of New York City, where funding and steady gig work fed back into one another (at least until Wynton Marsalis imposed his blanket-traditionalism) but the seminal pieces of protest music, those that would be taught in a thematic sound-art/electroacoustic class, are conspicuously not jazz. Our artistic history favors abstraction, as to better offset blame, to overly-intellectualize/conceptualize catastrophic crimes against humanity, and shoehorn in mercenary nuance to a binary of decency versus depravity. Why should our understanding of the political music of this era not account for any slippages of the palatable and the experimental? Instead, we’re preoccupied with the reach of “Fortunate Son” and the spartan constructions of Steve Reich, which aren’t reconciled within the popular consciousness until the true advent of rock and punk in downtown New York.

It’s unfortunate, as so much of the music dissected herein is totalizing, a physical and aural extension of lived experience, a wordless dispatch from the depths of the body and the mind. Even those that weren’t in Vietnam, like Lacy and his band(s), or The Revolutionary Ensemble, worked with an extratextual endurance, as evidenced by their contemporaneous recordings, which must have been exhausting ventures for all the players involved. And because many of these performances were only captured live, they would have otherwise dissipated at the whims of their creators. These onetime releases were also the last. 

Protest art isn’t exactly defined by any degree of ephemerality, but that can at least be a crude tool in which to measure the honesty of the project, or if it’s a cash-in, some lip-service to relevance. This also speaks to Bang’s Vietnam albums, which only came into being a few decades after the war. In an occasionally fraught public interview with Derek Taylor in 2001, Frank Lowe toggled between agreeably speaking out on Vietnam, and refusing to. He tells Taylor, “Let’s leave Vietnam alone man. Fuck that.”; only then, does he say: 

I told you I was there a year. I’m doing something with Bang. And he’s doing something with me and [Henry] Threadgill and Butch Morris, and all the cats that was in Vietnam, we’re putting it out soon. It was like a bad experience, I put it in the back of my mind. If I gotta use something, utilize part of it to call on it, I call on it. Otherwise it’s back there stored away, locked up, like some bad experience that everybody have. When you have these bad experiences man, you gotta tuck them away otherwise they gonna be fucked up in you like that, you dig. If you faced with a situation where you gotta utilize some part of it you come up, you unlock it and you deal with it. And then you send it right back. I don’t thrive on negativity.

And then you send it right back. We’ve come to a point where “spiritual” jazz is a big-ticket descriptor, where the innate noisemaking qualities of a saxophone, or trumpet, or violin, are expected to be vectors of universal catharsis. But then there’s John Coltrane’s “Alabama” or Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra; perhaps their deservedly continuing notoriety will bring more attention to artists who operated more on the peripheries, and whose work is being pushed further into niche corners of the internet. The word “tradition” has been weaponized against the avant-garde time and time again, but what if tradition were to account for a certain sociopolitical exorcism via sound?  As goes Lowe’s penultimate response to Taylor: “See when I’m doing this man, you know, actually when I play I’m relieving myself of daily situations. I’m frustrated too, just like everybody else. I mean I’m not just a happy-go-lucky jazz musician. So sometimes when I play I got problems and when I finish they don’t bother me as much.” The tradition accounts for the immediacy of the moment, and how one reacts, because one should. 

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Patrick Preziosi is a Brooklyn, NY born and based writer. His writing on film, music and literature have appeared in Cleveland Review of Books, Screen Slate, Reverse Shot, We Jazz, and more. He is the small press curator for McNally Jackson in NYC. 

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