Jazz

Brother Ah ‎– Move Ever Onward (1975/2002)

2019-12-28T16:15:30Z

Brother Ah ‎– Move Ever Onward (1975/2002)


A1 	Nature's Children	6:14
A2 	Transfiguration	9:46
A3 	Enthusiasm 	5:02
A4 	Spirits In The Night	6:52
B1 	Transcendental March (Creation Song)	3:36
B2 	Boundless Rhythm 	5:19
B3 	Celestial Strings 	8:39
B4 	Sweet Illumination "Chile Woman"	9:33

Arranged By, Composed By, Conductor, Drums, Flute, French Horn, Sitar, Sounds [Nature Sounds] – Brother Ahh
Bass – Eugene Cooper
Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone, Shawm – Pat Patrick
Congas, Drums – John Belcher
Congas, Drums, Tabla – Mbutu
Drums [African Drum] – Omowale
Drums, Oboe – Steve Solder
Drums, Performer [Kiti Kup] – Ras Karby
Electric Piano, Piano – Olu
Gong, Percussion, Shakuhachi, Performer [Space Beam] – Kufu Ptah
Guitar – Ayida Tengemana
Guitar, Percussion – Obowale
Kora, Percussion – Dara
Koto – Barbara Mc Cloud, Branice Inemugo Williams, Carolyn Davis, Elssi Atiba, Harold Lucious
Panpipes [Pan Flute] – Lance Dozier
Soloist – Kamau, Kassin, Khadijah, Kwesi
Tambourine, Coordinator – Alfred Wade, Jr.+
Voice [Reciting Poem] – Dara, Ayida Tengemana
Vocals - Aiisha, Kwesi Gilbert Northern

This isn't quite what one would expect from a man in Sun Ra's orbit. Quite frankly, this is mannered music, composed and arranged in side-long suites, sort of an African-tinged Porgy & Bess. The powerful voice of Aiisha kicks off each side with a sort of lyrical narration -- you know the sort: lots of images of cotton fields and hot baked streets, fairly typical for this sort of '60s ensemble. What isn't as typical is the instrumentation. Besides the expected African percussion, koto and other Asian instruments (including a sitar) are heard. One of the most affecting pieces might be "Celestial Strings," a duet of koto and kora backed with tumbling percussion. Like most of the album, the effect is subtly jarring and just different enough to be unique. ---Rob Ferrier, AllMusic Review

In contrast to the more aggressive records in jazz’s protest-album history-think Archie Shepp’s Fire Music and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra-are the lovey-dovey discs that more often than not offered Eastern-informed wisdom and always offered the missive “make love, not war.” Two lost LPs of that ilk by French hornist Brother Ah, aka Robert Northern, have recently been reissued on the Ikef label. (Ah is best known for appearing on John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass, a handful of Sun Ra discs and sundry other avant-garde recordings of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.)

Move Ever Onward, Ah’s peaceful joint from 1975, rests his message of love on a bed of East-meets-West instrumentation. Between the swami-stained guitar duet in “Enthusiasm” and the pizzicato mystery of “Celestial Strings,” you can almost smell the incense burning. Making peace with the atrocities presented by vocalist Aiisha is a task for a master mediator, however. Though she can hit those elusive notes in between the notes, she lacks the charm of say, a June Tyson, and if it weren’t for the mellowed and restrained saxophone solo by Pat Patrick that follows her wailings on “Transfiguration,” the track would be repeatedly subjected to my remote controlled wrath. Kwesi Gilbert Northern’s smoothster crooning on “Spirits in the Night,” on the other hand, charms and creates a mood like a Philly-sound slow-jam: soulful tranquility. Onward’s instrumentals continue to entrance 17 years after they were laid down, but the vocal tracks, with their fanciful encouragements of peace and love, have merely translated to kitsch in the 21st Century, bestowing Onward with alternate powers of inducing either nostalgia or nausea.

Sound Awareness, Ah’s collaboration with Max Roach, fares much better from start to finish. The liners explain that the 22-minute lead track, “Beyond Yourself,” contains the sounds and visions in a man’s mind as he’s forced to decide to either give up drugs or become a monk. That’s a tough and rather unreasonable choice I hope you’ll never have to make, but on the chance you have to: take the vow of silence. That way you can still fire one up, strap on the cans and freak out to delayed percussion reminiscent of Ra’s early reverb experiments, spectral wordless vocals by Barbara Grant and Ah’s piercing “natural sounds” (read: the squawk of hell-spawned seagulls). Roach wrote the other track, “Love Piece,” and has his M’Boom ensemble hypnotize with layered rhythms and bell-tones before exploding at the climax. Earnest like a televangelist hard up for a new Mercedes, Roach preaches for brotherhood over the polyrhythms and is answered by a “90 voice” ensemble conducted by Brother Ah. Somewhere in the lo-fi mix is Howard Johnson, whose tuba is also featured on Archie Shepp’s Mama Too Tight, an album that rates high on my list of favorite free-jazz experiences. ---Russell Carlson, jazztimes.com

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Brother Ahh - Sound Awareness (1972)

2018-09-02T13:08:02Z

Brother Ahh - Sound Awareness (1972)


A1 	Beyond Yourself (The Midnight Confession)	22:04

Cello – Pat Dixon
Flute, French Horn – Brother Ahh
Percussion – Barbara Burton
Voice [Soprano] – Barbara Grant

B1 	Love Piece

Featuring – The 90 Voice Sound Awareness Ensemble
Flute, French Horn – Brother Ahh
Percussion – M'Boom Re:percussion Ensemble
Rap – Max Roach
Tuba – Howard Johnson

Robert Northern or better known as BROTHER AHH is one of those jazz musicians who has been around forever having established himself as long ago as the late 50s after a classical French horn education at Austria's Vienna State Academy and worked with many of the greats that spanned the 60s, 70s and beyond including Donald Byrd, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Charlie Haden, Freddie Hubbard, Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis, Gil Evans and Don Cherry (as well as many others) but is probably most famous for his run with the great Sun Ra as the french horn player in his Astro-Affinity Arkestra in the early 70s on albums such as "Atlantis" and "Sound Sun Pleasure!!" Northern himself emerged from The Bronx in NYC and also studied at the Manhattan School of Music before heading off to Austria.

While playing his gigs with Sun Ra, Norton was becoming extremely intrigued by non-Western music styles and ultimately visited and studied in Africa throughout the 70s. As well as contributing to a massive number of albums by other artists including John Coltrane's seminal "Africa/Brass" in 1961, McCoy Tyner's "Tender Moments" and Thelonious Monk's "Orchestra In Town Hall" amongst countless other appearances, by 1972 Norton began to release material under his own pseudonym BROTHER AHH with his debut SOUND AWARENESS being released on the Strata East label in 1972 after finding time away from the Sun Ra Arkestra's demanding schedule. Keeping in the spirit of the avant-garde and otherworldly sound that Sun Ra had been developing throughout the 60s and well into the 70s, BROTHER AHH explored similar territories with emphasis on two side-long tracks that included the extradorinaiy talents of Max Roach on drums and his percussion ensemble M'Boom as well as a 90-piece vocal choir. Despite the similarities in approach, the music sounds nothing like the world of Sun Ra and comes off as nothing else i've ever experienced.

One (of the original Vinyl LP) consisted of the multi-movement piece "Beyond Yourself (The Midnight Confession) which was broken down into the segments "Introduction," "Rap," "Midnight Confession," "Fear," "Demons," "Morning Song" and "Dawn" that tells the tale of a man's struggle to eschew the temptations in life in order to become a monk. Musically speaking this one delivers an avant-garde mix of minimalistic jazz and flute (both played by AHH) that sprawl into lysergic atmospheric expanses of a sound journey that evokes an ethereal and spiritual vibe. Although the track can sprawl on for lengthy segments, there are moments of spaced out echoey noises with startling shouted lyrics before chilling out into a haunting yet mellow mode again complete with ghostly voices reaching to the heavens (kind of reminds me of the vocals on the theme song from the original Star Trek only much more freaky.) The track gets super freaky as it meanders with intermittent echoing percussive drives, a subdued lugubrious horn section and the aforementioned ghostly vocals. There are also times that the echo effect is so strong that it begins to sound like a whale song under the sea.

Side two consists the single track "Love Piece" which contrasts greatly (towards the end) as it experiments much more with a heavier emphasis on various styles of ethnic percussive styles performed by Max Roach and his ensemble while vocal outbursts serve as a faculty of agitation to instruct the instruments to perform as well as prodding the 90-voice choir to eschew a total breakdown in order. The piece starts out as a single flute solo that is airy and light sounding more like some sort of ancient Japanese koto music from the Edo period with only a few sparse shakers as percussion, but a few minutes in the horn and vocals fire up with the horns dominating at first with fiery interplay between the French horn, the flute and a tuba. Once the percussion kicks in though, all hell breaks loose as Max Roach delivers a poetic rant about desperation and destruction that starts to sound something like a mix of an African-American gospel service and a tripped out Haitian voodoo ritual all dressed up with avant-garde jazzy time signatures, intermittent instrumental accompaniments and a crowd that gets more and more worked up after every spoken word statement.

For anyone into the most freaked out aspects of Sun Ra's works, this will feel right at home and although in the same ballpark isn't an exact replica of that great Ra's style. This is another bizarre mixture altogether of psychedelic lysergia, avant-garde jazz, tribal rhythms and philosophical reflections taking the listener down extended journeys into bizarre soundscapes that paint diverse colors and varied texturized canvases. While Northern would continue to release more of his own works, he would also continue to collaborate with a diverse array of artists in the jazz world and beyond as well as expand his interests in the different ethnic musical styles of the world. On this bizarre debut called SOUND AWARENESS though, he managed to create a completely wild and unrelenting ride from placid detached ethereal soundscapes to a full-on stampede of percussive drive that ends the album in full bombast. This is an excellent album that carries on the Sun Ra type traditions and takes them somewhere that Ra himself never envisioned. ---siLLy puPPy, progarchives.com

The work of Robert Northern is among the most seminal, and sinfully neglected, of the later of these two. It is a music of profound intellect, artistry and identity. A social and political music, filled with optimism and joy. His work falls within a great legacy of organized sound – one far too often ignored, which inherited what John Coltrane proposed through his last efforts on earth. Music as a productive means for social change – an indication of a higher plane. The voice of a people, swelling toward the universal – past race, gender, class, and culture – a towering creative gesture, representing the humanity possessed by all. ---blogthehum.wordpress.com

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