Brother Ah heard the music in everything
BROTHER Ah spoke in a voice warmer than sunlight, and if you made a habit of tuning into ’The Collectors,’ the jazz veteran’s weekly program on WPFW (89.3 FM), you learned how to hear the music between the songs.
His guiding philosophy was something he called ‘sound awareness’ — the idea that we can better understand life by listening for music in every sound we encounter. Sure, Brother Ah had played with Thelonious Monk and Sun Ra, recorded with John Coltrane and Gil Evans, but he said he learned the most profound musical lessons of his life from children and birdsong, echoes and the wind.
For Brother Ah — who was born Robert Northern in 1934, and who died on Sunday at 86 — existence was a continuous listening experience. Seven years ago, hoping to learn his life story, I spent a week following him around the city, from the WPFW studios to the Montessori school where he gave wordless drumming lessons. His ears were always on. He might be in the middle of telling a story about the recording session for Coltrane’s ‘Africa/Brass,’ when he would notice a particular sound in the background, point his index finger toward the sky and smile.
He got his start on a bugle, playing call-and-response games with the sounds of the city from a fire escape in the Bronx. He played trumpet throughout his adolescence, but switched to the French horn to gain entry to the Manhattan School of Music, where he learned the music of Brahms and Schubert.
After stints with Metropolitan Opera and the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, he appeared on records with Charlie Haden, Art Farmer and McCoy Tyner before eventually recording with his own improvisational groups in the mid-’70s.
But instead of ‘improvisation,’ Brother Ah preferred the term ‘spontaneous creativity,’ and “it really came to me when I was playing with Sun Ra,” he said.
“When I got into Sun Ra’s band, I came with my education, I had studied at all these conservatories ... Sun Ra turned to me, ‘Man,’ he says, ‘Forget all of your laws. The only law of my band is the law of nature.’