A master of the French horn, Mr. Northern was adept at both classical music and jazz. As a bandleader, he was devoted to what he called “sound awareness.”
Robert Northern, a masterly French horn player who hopscotched between the worlds of jazz and classical music before embarking on a solo career in which he made music that defied categorization, died on May 31 in Washington. He was 86.
His wife, Ayana Watkins-Northern, said the cause was a respiratory illness that he had been battling for about a year.
In his 20s and 30s, Mr. Northern played on some of the most storied orchestral recordings in jazz history, including “The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall,” John Coltrane’s “Africa/Brass” and Charlie Haden’s “Liberation Music Orchestra.”
He spent a decade in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, an experimental group that espoused a spiritualist ethos. He carried a similar approach into his own career as a bandleader.
In that role, he went by the name Brother Ah, an artfully universalist moniker that bespoke his devotion to what he called “sound awareness.” By that, he meant the practice of treating all sound with the kind of close attention and respect that one would give to a great work of music.
“I learned that every entity on Earth is communicating through sound,” Mr. Northern told The Washington Post in 2017. “Every animal, every bird, every insect. And if we hear it, we can be a part of it.”
For the last two decades of his life, Mr. Northern presided over a weekly radio show, “The Jazz Collectors,” on WPFW, a community FM station in Washington, his adopted hometown. Playing a mix of jazz and spiritual music from across the globe, he became a pillar of the local airwaves, as well as an ambassador of jazz’s midcentury heyday.
Robert Anthony Northern was born on May 21,1934, at his grandmother’s house in Kinston, a small town in North Carolina. His parents were both from the South but at that point were living in New York; soon after his birth, Mr. Northern’s father, Ralph, was assaulted by a Klansman. He fought back and won, then headed straight to the train stationand returned to New York, knowing that he would not be safe remaining in Kinston. The rest of the family soon followed.
Ralph Northern was a singer who performed at New York nightclubs and toured the East Coast; he also worked for the city’s gas and electricity company, Consolidated Edison.
