While developing his jazz career in New York in the mid 1960’s, Juma Sultan realized that due to the improvisational nature of jazz, he was witnessing and making some amazing music that was not captured in any way.
He purchased a Nagra tape recorder to document these fleeting improvisations.
Juma is responsible for amassing the largest and most important archive of recordings and visual ephemera from this under-documented movement in American music.
In addition to serving as an interview subject on countless books and documentaries on the life of Jimi Hendrix, Juma Sultan is the subject of an e-book by Stephen D. Farina, published by Wesleyan University Press, entitled “Reel History:The Lost Archive of Juma Sultan and the Aboriginal Music Society”, which is an imaginative, multimedia work detailing the story of the Aboriginal Music Society and how Juma Sultan’s extensive Jazz recordings came to be archived at Clarkson University.
Juma’s archive from the Loft Jazz era, and his anecdotes thereof, were utilized significantly as primary source material for Michael Heller’s book “Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s”, which is described as “the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid a series of overlapping discourses surrounding collectivism, urban renewal, experimentalist aesthetics, underground archives, and the radical politics of self-determination.”
In 2006, a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts enabled the digitization of a small but significant portion of Juma’s Loft Jazz archival recordings.
The archival project was subsequently reinforced by the efforts of ethnomusicologists Stephen Farina and Michael Heller.
Much of the archive has been digitized, but a majority of the work remains to be done.
Fundraising efforts to that end are currently active.
Two excellent commercial releases have been generated from Juma’s archive of recordings. In 2011, Eremite Records released “Father of Origin,” a box set of recordings from the Loft Jazz days as well as a cornucopia of content including a booklet of information and Juma’s ‘protest’ letter for the Newport Jazz Festival programming.
2012 saw the Porter Records release “Whispers from the Archive,” a double-album of music from his Aboriginal Music Society collective.
