A tribute to John Andrew Ross

Robin Washington

In more than 30 years as music director of Black Nativity, John Andrew Ross has had thousands of good students.

I was not one of them.

That became clear in the 20th anniversary season, when my mind wandered off during a WBZ-TV taping of John at the piano as he attempted to explain the intricacies of a choral arrangement.

I had an excuse: Outside, the Stuart Case was ravaging Boston. I had been up all night on some weighty matter. The camera crew was grumpy and we were already late for our next shoot.

So to speed things along, I tried to force a comment on the universality of music and be done with it.

“ Why, that riff is identical to one in L.A. Woman by the Doors,” I said as he played a repetitive bass line.

He shot a look that would kill. We stayed until he was done.

“ I don’t quite remember that. It was a long time ago and Jim Morrison and I haven’t been keeping company lately,” John said following a rehearsal for the 1999 run of the venerable Langston Hughes classic.

That’s not to say the analogy had wandered outside John’s musical vocabulary, however.

“ I was listening to some 19th Century English choral music the other day, and I just did a concert of Burmese music, which I really love,” he said of a performance with Kwah Kwah Naing.

Yet, while music is such an overpowering force of Black Nativity, it is actually a by-product of the performance, not the goal, he said. “The real agenda is the human agenda, which is to take these little people and make them blessings and make them responsible,” he explained of the young members of the cast.

“The Christmas story is a good kind of lever for their understanding, whether they’re Christian or not. It tells the story of a baby who did not know what was ahead for him.

“I say to them, ‘There’s some reason why we’re put here, and as we look at the lives of Jesus and Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman and Nelson Mandela, we see they discover that as they go along. You’ve already come here as a blessing. You’ve got a head start.’”

None of this is to say he doesn’t care what they sound like, however. “Music of course is the focus. In black life music is profoundly important, as it is in any culture,” he said.

It’s also the key to John’s own professional evolution, beginning shortly after he left Boston University just before graduation. “I left to do some work. I said, ‘I’ll be back,’ and then I got busy like so many people do,” he said. “I didn’t know I was a professional musician until one day someone turned to me and said, ‘John, as a professional, what’s your opinion?’”

Since that time, the professional has performed at New York’s Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and throughout the Diaspora from Senegal to Haiti to Bahia. Closer to home, he is minister of music at The First Parish Church in Brookline as well as music director for the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts and the National Center for Afro-American Artists.

To that, add guest performances at a plethora of pulpits and venues offering an endlessly varied repertoire, though not likely any numbers from the Doors.

“My musical tastes don't run in that direction but I admire a lot of things I don’t follow,” he said.

And, he added, “If somebody feels blessed by it, then it’s great.”

Robin Washington is editorial page editor for the Duluth, Minn. News Tribune. He originally wrote this tribute to John Andrew Ross for the Black Nativity program book in 1999.

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