Breathairean Ensemble

The seed reaches Cincinnati

Arnold Ehret’s Mucusless Diet Healing System reached Cincinnati’s African-American community the same way it would leave it: through music. In the late 1970s, saxophonist Victor Buttrom led a circle of Cincinnati Ehretists and founded a free-jazz collective in honor of Ehret’s work called The Healing System, performing progressive music in the communities and streets of the city. The Breathairean Ensemble has a direct ancestor — and it was already a band.

A drummer meets the diet

Brother Air — drumming since the age of four, inspired in his teens by the vegetarian civil-rights activist Dick Gregory — met Buttrom while he was playing on the street. Air became an Ehretist and spent the next decades redefining what practice means: a year eating nothing but fruit, juice fasts measured in months, and a lifestyle template that serious practitioners still follow.

Set break at Chez Nora

Summer 2002, at Chez Nora — the jazz club at Sixth and Main in Covington, Kentucky’s MainStrasse Village, where live jazz ran five nights a week upstairs. A young Conservatory trombonist named Spira and his saxophonist friend Daktehu loaded their plates at the free buffet during the set break. Then Brother Air began to speak — very clearly — about the Mucusless Diet Healing System: the year on fruit, the 100-day fasts, and the idea that changed everything for two young musicians: the body is the true instrument, and an artist’s first priority is the refinement of the real instrument. By the end of the conversation both had decided to buy Ehret’s book. Weeks later, alone with his trombone and a practice-room mirror, Spira made a vow: to dedicate his life to physiological liberation.

Charles Lloyd demands music

In November 2003, Spira and Brother Air met jazz legend and fellow Ehretist Charles Lloyd after a Columbus concert. Deep into a conversation about fasting expeditions in the mountains of Europe, Lloyd made a demand that became a destiny:

“He demanded that we get him some music reflecting our lifestyle. This was a great inspiration for what would evolve into the Breathairean Ensemble.”— Prof. Spira

The meeting inspired Brother Air’s first 8½-month juice fast — at whose finale he recorded his solo percussion album in a single take.

The Best Band in the City

Commissioned to assemble a group for a series of engagements at the University of Cincinnati — staged at the Alley Cat, the venue by campus — Spira papered the conservatory with flyers announcing that the B.B.C. — the Best Band in the City — would perform “a wonderful evening of creative black music,” a phrase chosen in homage to the AACM. The flyers were torn down and defaced; a repressed tension in the school burst into the open. The band played anyway.

The band that was left standing

The commissioned concerts ended. The rehearsals didn’t. And one day the musicians still in the room — Spira, Daktehu, ‘Uncle’ Eddie Brookshire, Baby Babaji, and Brother Air — noticed something no one had planned: everyone was vegetarian, and most practiced the Mucusless Diet Healing System. The group took a new name in the lineage of the Art Ensemble of Chicago: the Breathairean Ensemble — spelled deliberately unlike any “breatharian” that came before, because the name is aspirational, not a costume:

“The breathairean level is not merely something to think about psychologically, philosophically, or mythically — it is something that you will feel, experience, and know for yourself.”— Prof. Spira, on the spelling, 2006

The mission was set from day one: the group functions as a support system for its members striving to achieve physiological liberation. Family and community oriented — the Ensemble does not play in bars.

Music that saves lives

Then came the era the recordings remember: the Children of the Sun concert at CCM’s Cohen Family Studio Theater (April 6, 2006 — performed as Spira’s Master of Music recital), the televised City Nights performance (July 14, 2006), the Immortality Pipeline radio show on 88.3 WAIF FM Cincinnati (2006–2009) — called the most controversial and progressive health radio show in the country — the Booker T. Washington Health Month celebrations (2007–08), the Freedom Jazz Festival at the Underground Railroad Freedom Center (2007) — where Bootsy Collins introduced the band — the commissioned Rhinoceros soundtrack (2009), and the What You Will Festival (2011).

Carrying the torch

The world caught up slowly — the Ensemble was sharing this message years before the modern social feed existed. From its foundation grew Mucus-free Life, Prof. Spira’s educational mission, and the Fire Music Project (est. 2019, Columbus), where Spira and Brother Air keep pushing the music forward. And on Friday night, July 28, 2023 — after twelve years — the Ensemble reunited for a historic concert at the 5th Annual Prof. Arnold Ehret Day Celebration. The aspiration has only grown: a mucus-free arts movement spanning music, visual arts, and dance. A new back-to-nature renaissance. That was always the vision.