In recent years, a significant body of scholarship has been devoted to critiquing the settler-colonial epistemologies embedded in 'acoustic ecology,' particularly in relation to R. Murray Schaffer and the World Soundscape Project (Robinson 2020; Hagood 2021). While this work has illuminated the indigenous erasure and environmental imaginaries shaping late twentieth-century listening listening practices, comparatively little attention has been paid to parallel ecological discourses within Black music. Many artists associated with the 1970s jazz avant-garde developed novel ways of theorizing relationships between human and non-human actors, instantiating them in new musical and pedagogical forms.

This presentation examines these questions through the music and pedagogy of Robert Northern (Brother Ah). After performing with leading jazz artists in the 1960s, Northern developed a set of relational listening practices in the early 1970s that he referred to as “sound awareness,” an encompassing philosophy of ecological listening shaped by his travels across the African continent and by Afrocentric thought. As an instructor at Dartmouth College (1970-73), he developed pedagogical practices oriented not only toward trained musicians but toward “anyone who would awaken to music in the natural world.”

For Northern, communion nature and with an ancestral homeland were inseparable; nature’s real or imagined wholeness served to counteract the violent rupture of diaspora, providing rootedness to those who have been forcibly uprooted. Situating Northern alongside contemporaries such as Sun Ra, and drawing from theorists Fumi Okiji and Kodwo Eshun, this paper reframes 1970s Black experimental music as a crucial, yet overlooked, site of ecological thought.