Brother Ah
Sound Awareness

Behind the moniker Brother Ahh was Robert Northern, a jazz musician who, since the late '50s, lent his skills with the flute and the French horn, his favorite instruments, to countless formations of canonical jazz and beyond. Starting from the mid-'60s, he began a long active involvement with the Sun Ra Intergalactic Arkestra. From that period, there are also recordings in his name strongly influenced by Ornette Coleman's free jazz; however, unlike his friend and colleague Sun Ra, the style of the Northern composer was always polycentric rather than monocentric, strongly tied to a pan-ethnic vision of music, very spiritual, meditative, and naturalistic.

In 1969, he was at the Department of Music Culture at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he conducted a literary-musical seminar, and where the idea to form a personal band arose with some of his students, which would take the name Sound Awareness Ensemble. The musical experiments led to the recording of a long composition divided into seven acts inspired by lysergic visions and a bad trip. Beyond Yourself is an electro-acoustic suite with a slow and mellifluous pace, where instruments like percussion, voice, cello, flute, etc., are all electronically processed through magnetic tape and mixed with natural sounds, creating an occasionally cosmic and reassuring, at times infernal and frightening environment. The sounds live in an abstract mysticism, influenced more by the now-distant psychedelic culture than by Robert Northern's previous experiences. This suite occupies the entire first side of the "Sound Awareness" LP released in 1972. The second side contains a piece signed by Pat Curtis and drummer Max Roach, another veteran of the bebop scene since his debut in the early '40s with Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. The suite Love Piece begins with a long section on the flute by Northern that evokes a haunting tribal dance; the sounds add up to the percussion and become increasingly chaotic with Roach's voice launched into a martial monologue defined as "Rap" in the texts. The percussive part is now entrusted to the rhythms of the M'Boom, an American commune interested in African art and culture, with a choir of as many as ninety people responding to Roach's questions with assent. The album in question is easily presentable as a collaboration between the two talents - Robert Northern - Max Roach - at a particular moment when their creative paths united under the banner of a culture of being, free and anarchic both in form and substance.

The record may be of greater interest to lovers of electro-acoustic experimentation and late European psychedelia than to the simple, too-often narrow-minded cultivators of free jazz.