But for all the glorification of hip-hop’s early days in the South Bronx — the brilliant improvisation, the block parties — there isn’t a whole lot of supporting documentation. A lot of what we know is from the fading memories of aging b-girls and b-boys who were present at the creation.

Some of the most important surviving documents from that period were the party flyers. You may remember the story our colleagues at NPR music did on the party where hip-hop was born and the flyer advertising the jam at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue at a cost of 25 cents for the “ladies” and 50 cents for the “fellas.” That flyer consisted of some scribbled writing on lined paper.

The party flyers of Lemoin Thompson — a.k.a. Buddy Esquire — were much more sophisticated than that. Esquire created more than 300 flyers over a half-decade that were handed out around the neighborhood to advertise the parties. He called his style “neo-deco” — it borrowed heavily from the Art Deco styles of old movie posters. That was on purpose: he wanted to “class up” the proceedings, which were often held in rec rooms and high schools. Esquire told Cornell University graduate student Amanda Lalonde, “That’s what I tried for, you know: give it a level of class even though it was just a ghetto jam.”

He became the preeminent flyer artist of the early days, and after he could no longer afford to store them, an archivist named Johan Kugelberg, purchased the collection and republished them in a book. Taken together, the flyers offer a glimpse into hip-hop’s beta stage, before rappers could get record deals.

Esquire died earlier this month from smoke inhalation after a kitchen accident. He was 55. His funeral drew in all sorts of early hip-hop pioneers.

“Among those wandering in and out of the small funeral home were Afrika Bambaataa, the D.J.; Charlie Ahearn, the film director; and Theodore Livingston, better known as Grandwizzard Theodore, who is said to have invented scratching.

“‘A flyer either made you want to tell everyone about the party, or not go at all,’ said Mr. Livingston, 50, who huddled with former graffiti artists in the back of the funeral home, swapping stories about Mr. Thompson. In the spirit of hip-hop braggadocio, he shut down debate over whether Phase 2, Mr. Thompson’s competitor, may have been better. ‘Buddy. No question,’ Mr. Livingston insisted.

Before the flyers, though, Esquire was a graffiti artist. He started tagging in 1972 — before hip-hop was even a thing and at a time when the police cracked down hard on graffiti artists. But he said it became like an urge he kept succumbing to, even after scrapes with the law and his parents. “[It’s] like an itch a drive to want to do it to want to get better, to want to work hard at it,” he told OldSchoolHipHop.com back in 2010.”Sometimes you do it on a couple of pieces of paper sometimes you just want to go out and write. When that time came and I graduated to the trains and I use to hit the Bay Chester layup. It was a crazy rush tagging inside and outside of the trains. By the early 80′s I was finished.”

All the while, he was creating party flyers, an idea he approached with early hip-hop’s improvisational, autodidactic spirit.

“I went to the library and I took out a book on fine painting, where they talked about letters, proportions and lay outs and stuff like that … So I took a look at the book and I tried drawing some of the letters that were in the book and I said to myself, hey I can do this stuff. [sic] So now what made me go to the library was because when people would put paint on jeans and stuff it was either graffiti or some kind of sloppy looking hand writing [sic]. So I was like figuring let me do it this way and that will make my stuff noticeable.”

He definitely got noticed. In the few years he was active, he made over 300 flyers. And because this is hip-hop, there were always bragging rights at stake.

“There were guys like A. Riley, who was alright,” he told OldSchoolHipHop. He rattled off some more names of his flyer-making contemporaries. “Then there was Danny Tongue who used to do flyers for Flash also, and he was more like an illustrator I think. Then there was Cisco Kid who ran with The Herculords, he made flyers for Charlie Chase.”

But even as he acknowledged them, he felt the need to clarify his place in the pecking order: “I am the King of Flyers! Period.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Ho has always been matter-of-fact and in-your-face. He painted himself green and posed naked for the cover his album, Celestial Green Monster. In the photo, he has a baritone saxophone placed strategically between his legs. He looks strong — like the Hulk.

Ho is an accomplished jazz musician with 12 operas and several albums to his name. But he avoids the term “jazz” because he says it originally denigrated the work of black musicians. (He instead refers to some of his work as “Afro-Asian Futurism.”) Ho helped solidify Asian-American music as a genre of its own.

And now, 56-year-old Ho is in hospice, dealing with stage four colorectal cancer.

“You push the Hulk too far, you know, the Hulk would become this raging behemoth that would just smash everything this way, and that’s how I saw myself fighting the system,” Ho says about the photos. It’s mid-morning on a Friday, but already he seems tired, speaking slowly, lying on his couch with a catheter tucked underneath the elastic waistband of his pants.

(Ho, who makes his own clothing out of bright fabrics, tells me that he’s wearing the only T-shirt he owns. It’s a shirt that says “BRAISED PORK — WITH FAT” in Chinese and English. Ho loved braised pork so much that one of his friends made it for him after his cancer diagnosis back in 2006. They had a “fat back fan club,” he recalls with a grin.)

Fred says there’s a stereotype that Asian American men aren’t strong — or sexy — and he’s trying to help break that.

And he’s always been fighting against something since he was very young. When Ho was growing up, his father, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, faced a lot of discrimination at work. Ho says his dad was one of the college’s most published professors but also the lowest paid.

“He took it out on us — his anger, his frustrations — rather than fight the white establishment. So I learned a lesson, and it was to never internalize that stuff. So early on I became a fighter. A fighter both against the white establishment, white society, but also against our own kind that internalizes oppression.”

Ho says his father didn’t let his mother drive or even learn to speak English.

“She was on an allowance of 50 cents a week. I saw her arrested for shoplifting sanitary napkins at the age of 6. … The metaphor for my life is to turn pain into power, is never to become a victim. Become a revolutionary,” Ho says. He once told Harvard Magazine that he intervened as his father was beating his mother and gave his father two black eyes.

Ho is known both for his music — rowdy sounds that mix the thin, warbling noises of Chinese instruments with the swinging tunes of big-band music — and for his outspoken political views.

He’s prone to talking at great length about the history of the Black Power movement, or even explaining details of something he calls the Scientific Soul Sessions. The latter is his latest brainchild, born after his cancer diagnosis in August 2006. Scientific Soul Session members are “united by the drive to prefigure a new society free of imperialism, colonization, racism, heteropatriarchy & capitalist exploitation,” according to its website.

He was 14 when he read Malcolm X’s autobiography for the first time. Ho says art from the Black Power movement influenced many Asian Americans — including himself.

“We looked to the black experience as a reference, as a metaphor to our own,” Ho says.

Ho was also 14 when he started playing the baritone saxophone; he took it up and immediately felt a connection.

“This big horn that had this unyielding, raucous, raw and uncontrollable sound. And that came — that became my voice,” Ho says.

Decades later, Ho can coax six octaves out of his baritone — most players are lucky to hit five. There’s even a legend about Ho’s playing and how he knew he was hitting those high notes. He was at a music residency, practicing his baritone saxophone in his cabin late at night.

“I would notice that some points, the wolves and the coyotes were very close to my cabin because I could see their eyes, would be howling, and other times when I was playing in a normal hearing range they’d still be there but not saying anything,” Ho recalls.

But politics are never far from his music, and it’s not just about making beautiful sounds or hitting the high notes. Ho is also known for creating a new type of opera.

In Journey Beyond The West, a three-part opera, Ho re-imagines the ancient Chinese legend of The Monkey King. Monkey is born from stone and gets super powers through Taoist practices. And Monkey is a rebel who wants to become immortal, like the gods who oppress him. You’ll notice that unlike the original story, Fred doesn’t call Monkey a “king.” He’s just “Monkey,” since Ho’s story is set in a Communist paradise.

“It allowed me to create my own genre of opera that combined martial arts movement with fantastical characters and settings … it was filled with humor and satire,” Ho says.

Bill Shoemaker, a jazz critic who’s followed Ho’s work for more than 20 years, says that an artist who can change the dialogue that’s ongoing in jazz is just as important as the artist who creates a masterpiece.

“I think if you took 10 people who really know Fred’s music inside-out and you ask ’em, ‘OK, what’s Fred Ho’s masterpiece?’ I don’t think you’d get a unanimous verdict,” Shoemaker says. “But if you ask the same 10 people about artists who really change the dialogue, who really change the term of engagement between artist and audience, then they would say, ‘Yep, that’s Fred Ho.’ ”

Ho has even been trying to change the dialogue around cancer.

He was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2006. He’s had 10 surgeries, five rounds of chemotherapy and all the different types of treatments you can imagine. Yet he’s still in-your-face. He sent graphic emails to friends about his cancer, all his symptoms, all his side effects. He thinks that cancer and capitalism are both toxic. One is bad for the body, one is bad for society. Now he’s published the emails in a book.

“I feel like for a long time, I thought, ‘Fred Ho will never die.’ … He is forever,” says Joseph Yoon, Ho’s long time friend and music manager.

And it seems like Ho is often getting calls from his friends. They phone rings. Multiple times. They ask how he is — even during our conversation.

“Personally, I’ve thought of [Fred Ho as] someone who I’ve both loved and feared over the years. But I think the former has overtaken the latter of late … he’s really helped me grow so much that I don’t have to fear him,” says Ben Barson, a student of Fred’s. Barson is one of Ho’s friends who are taking a 16-piece band on a tour of the Northeast. They want to introduce a new audience to the voice of Fred Ho.

“I’ve gotten over [dying] now. What hurts me most is the loss of my friendships. That’s the hardest difficulty I have… the physical death doesn’t scare me,” Ho says, his voice cracking. “What devastates me the most is the loss of what future joys and discovers might have happened if I didn’t die so young.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Later, they’d get weird; experimental, rebellious, more transparently and transcendentally high than maybe any band ever, at least to hear the music tell it. They became legends, they became celebrities and movie stars. They had a dark breakup like so many great loves, and they went their separate ways, and one of them was shot and one died of cancer, and they became a story as well as a band.

But back then, when they appeared on Ed Sullivan, they were just a band. A really good band, a really popular band, a phenomenally exciting band. But they were a band. And you hear those songs, I mean, “All My Loving.” Is that a great song? Or is it just a really, really, really good song? “Till There Was You,” they borrowed from The Music Man. They stole it from Broadway, the sweetest, corniest kind of Broadway, too. The Music Man wasn’t the Rent or Hair of its time; it was just a pretty little show about an Iowa librarian. Imagine bringing those lyrics to teenagers now: “There were bells on the hills, but I never heard them ringing; no, I never heard them at all till there was you.” If they didn’t roll their eyes, their parents would.

Back Before They Were Genius

That wasn’t all the Beatles were lifting, of course; they were voracious appropriators. Almost half of their first album was covers. And from early on, they were dipping their buckets deeply into Little Richard and Motown, most of all, both directly and indirectly. Not just that though, they would later do country like “Act Naturally,” not to mention “When I’m Sixty-Four,” which sounds like exactly the kind of simple, music-hall ditty their audience might have wanted to get past.

In those early days of getting to know Americans, the Beatles performed songs that would live forever, like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and ones that are for fans, like “This Boy.” These aren’t the songs that people will tell you changed everything musically speaking; purists usually point to later albums — your Sgt. Pepper, your White Album, your Revolver and Abbey Road — for that. At this point, they were pop stars, they really were, so much so that John Lennon was introduced to American television audiences with the caption, “Sorry Girls, He’s Married.” Their music was exceptional, but it was joyfully, spiritedly, danceably pop.

In their later years, the Beatles would appeal to the American mythology of genius: the dark creatives at war over one’s new partner, the trips to see the Maharishi and the flights of fancy like Magical Mystery Tour. Early on though, when they were pop stars, they appealed, and still do, to our fascination with alchemy.

On their own, later, what they produced was sometimes brilliant, but also sometimes … well, common. They read as pop stars again, sometimes shaking their piece of the earth, but more often seeming strangely mortal. Wonderful, but mortal, even before John Lennon died the kind of death that brought about its own songs of grieving, just as Buddy Holly’s death had five years before the Beatles came to the United States.

A Superhero Origin Story

But back then, even those of us who weren’t alive know perfectly well it was a thing that we, on the other hand, have never seen. Not all at once, not in one band. From movements, maybe. From MTV. But not all in one band have we ever watched everything change as fast as everyone pretty much agrees it did. From these guys who would later prove capable of folly and even schmaltz was this explosive, energizing, resonant music that managed to get respect despite being hugely popular with teenage girls, which is very, very difficult to do. Only a few months after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, something really good happened. And it was a band.

If arrival in the United States makes an origin story at all, it’s not an origin story like a hard-working professional has; it’s an origin story like a superhero has. The lights come on, the man says “The Beatles!” the band starts playing, and it’s just music on a variety show, but people are still talking about it 50 years later. Why? Is it just the music? Is it just the very good songs and the smart choices of source material? Was it us? Was it Kennedy? Was it timing?

It was the music; musicologists can explain — and could even then — how surprisingly complex some of this material was, and how much more carefully arranged it was than much of the pop available at the same time. And it was appeal that can’t exactly be quantified; you can hear it when you put those albums again and hear a song you love, and then another one, and then another one, and eventually you realize that even the lionized form of this band doesn’t convey how much they sank into our bones, whether we were here for them or not.

I was born the year they broke up for good, only months before Paul McCartney filed a lawsuit to dissolve the band. But of all the bands that weren’t active when I was alive, none comes close to the influence of this one. I can remember putting the records on (we used to have these round black discs with grooves in them and we would scratch them with diamond needles to make music come out). I can even remember what the lyrics looked like on the album sleeves, even though I didn’t have the first clue what a lot of them meant.

When I was in college, over a holiday weekend, a radio station somewhere ran every recorded Beatles song from A to Z, and my friend taped it to cassette and eventually copied it for me. They’d left only one out, and if you could identify it, you could win money. (It was “Please Please Me,” easy to spot since it failed to follow “Please Mr. Postman.” My friend didn’t win.) So for years, I had ratty old cassette copies of Beatles songs, not in album order, but in alphabetical order. It was one of the bands I listened to, even though Lennon had died by then.

Later on it was genius, but that early stuff, that early stuff is as close as you’re going to get to magic. The differences between this band and a million others aren’t easy for a layperson to put her finger on. It’s mysterious: take this band, add this audience, add this music, pick your moment, and it goes. And 50 years later, we’ve never gotten it to happen again.

Many thanks to my pal and amateur Beatles-ologist Marc Hirsh for his help with this piece. Anything good, he helped with. Anything bad was all me.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.