In the Fried Archives: Brother Ah
From 2017, the free jazz/ new age visionary on elephant noises with Coltrane, a blood baptism with Sun Ra, living with Masai tribesmen, and playing for Tanzanian monkeys.
(This interview was originally conducted for the 3LP box set, Divine Music.)
Approaching Robert Northern’s home just outside of Takoma Park one evening, the sound of birdsong is overwhelming. Can the birds always be this loud? Maybe that’s just how it is once you’re away from trash trucks and cop sirens, I thought to myself. But upon being granted entrance to the home of the man known to dedicated free jazz fans as Brother Ah, I realized that it’s no coincidence; the peaceful vibrations that emanate from his home in fact make the birds convene around his abode. As I would learn over the course of our career-spanning interview, Ah is attuned to the cosmic music that surrounds us all, a sound that underlies the three albums that comprise Divine Music.
Brother Ah greets me in his parlor, gently strumming an autoharp so that cascades of sound surround us. It’s a tuning he picked up from Laraaji, he mentions, another New York music veteran whose deeply resonant spiritual music continues to turn on new listeners in the 21st century. That the man whose weekly show on WPFW (89.3 FM) “The Jazz Collectors” has connections to a musician like Laraaji is but the tip of the iceberg. As Robert Northern, he was a respected French horn player in New York’s classical music world and an in-demand session man, meaning he performed as a member of Leopold Stokowski-helmed The Symphony of the Air and with the likes of Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, and Johnny Mathis.
Heading down to his basement den, one wall is lined with intimate, in-studio photographs of some of the greatest names to ever record jazz and Northern recorded with all of them: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, Quincy Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Gil Evans, Max Roach, Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan, to name a few. In another corner is a collection of hand-carved reed flutes that Brother Ah acquired during his extensive travels in Ghana. As Saint-Saëns and Chopin play softly in the background, Robert Northern tells me about how he transformed into Brother Ah and how this divine music came into being.
Are you from New York originally?
I was born in Kinston, North Carolina. Born in my grandmother's unpainted house across the street from the African-American cemetery. The freight trains used to ride past us on the dirt road and that's my humble beginnings. Like lots of African-American people, we made our move to New York during the Great Depression. We went to Harlem and lived on 8th Avenue, 138th Street and 8th. My father used to walk across the wooden bridge that went across the Harlem River. So it went from Harlem to the Bronx with this wooden bridge. We used to swim there, we used to have picnics on the side of the Harlem River.
You started off playing trumpet as a child?
Well…I really started on bugle. At 5 years old, there was an old lady that lived in the building. Her husband used to be the bugler in the first World War and he got killed like many buglers did. So she brought back his battered bugle. I blew out such a big tone that delighted her so much that she gave me the bugle.
So I used to sit on my fire escape on the 5th floor and I used to imitate all the sounds I heard on the street. Back in the day, in the thirties and early forties there were still a lot of horse and wagons in New York then. The guys would come by selling watermelon, vegetables and fruit. They all had a certain cry or call and I would imitate them and the dogs barking, anything that went past my building. So I started with the bugle and then my parents took me to the Apollo Theater to see Dizzy Gillespie's band and…well of course I connected the bugle to the trumpet because they look similar. The lights that were gleaning off of the brass instruments, the whole aura of the Apollo Theater and Dizzy's playing that trumpet was like *clap* I wanted a trumpet!
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