The percussionist and bassist Juma Sultan is a link between free jazz and Jimi Hendrix, and a puzzle piece in the history of musicians’ cooperatives. He moved to New York City from California in 1966 and a few years later to Woodstock, N.Y., joining an artists’ group called Group 212 Intermedia Workshop. With the multi-instrumentalist Ali Abuwi he helped form the Aboriginal Music Society, a loose assembly of players who prided themselves on absolute inclusiveness; you could join in, no matter what you did. (“Any Song, Any Key, Anywhere,” was their motto.) Hendrix dropped by to play with him in 1969, a few days before the Woodstock festival, resulting in a much-bootlegged jam session. Then Mr. Sultan returned to Manhattan and moved into Studio We, the performance space on Eldridge Street, recording and resuming his playing with Mr. Abuwi and whomever else.
The Hendrix recording is not — repeat, is not — on the two-LP-and-one-CD boxed set called “Juma Sultan’s Aboriginal Music Society: Father of Origin,” to be released next week by Eremite. It’s a lavish and thorough monument to a chapter of jazz in which the cultural politics were sometimes more interesting than the music. But three other Aboriginal Music Society sessions are here, and they suggest the struggle and chaos of the most purely democratic free jazz, in which there wasn’t really a stable common language. All players brought bits and pieces of their own interests and experiences, which generally included an absorption in late Coltrane. The last session is the most pointed and best, a jam including some musicians from the St. Louis musicians’ cooperative Black Artists Group, including the saxophonist Julius Hemphill, the cellist Abdul Wadud and the drummer Phillip Wilson. With reproductions of hand-drawn flyers and black-and-white photographs snapped on the fly, the boxed set is a cool, collected document of a wobbly, scratchy time.
The Aboriginal Music Society belongs to an incendiary time when the boundaries between musics were temporarily falling, and the possibilities of new relationships seemed to exist everywhere. In Sultan’s avowedly social program for recording and disseminating music, there’s also an insistence on the relationships between musical and social structures and the ways they might reflect and affect one another. The special beauty of this set is the way in which it seeks to memorialize that vision, from the lengths taken to match performance lengths to the best possible medium (and the unimaginably living sound of an analogue LP of an analogue restoration of an analogue recording) to the meticulous reproduction of sometimes decaying photographs. In its tactility as well as its sound, the set resists the easy reproducibility of the digital, insisting on the presence of the artefact and the rarest flash of color. Father of Origin lends a coolly reflective timelessness to a world as lost as it is intense, the intensity of which still feels like necessity. The set honours that intensity in the process, creating presence.
Once you break from the Great Man-oriented history of jazz, you swap a time-line for something more like a multi-hued magic carpet woven from a myriad of narratives. Some of those stories are quite public and others well hidden, but Juma Sultan is one rare bird who has managed to be both at once. He associated with the best, and not just the obscure; he was Jimi Hendrix’s good pal and go-to conga player, appearing with him at Woodstock and on The Dick Cavett show. He also played on boundary-erasing jazz documents such as Noah Howard’s The Black Ark and Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues.
The Aboriginal Music Society, a mutable music group/recording studio/artist’s collective that he co-led with fellow multi-instrumentalist Ali Abuwi from 1968-1978, welcomed both anonymous players and celebrated 1960s and ‘70s personages such as Julius Hemphill, Barry Altschul, David Izenzon and Charles “Bobo” Shaw into its ranks. The AME performed at Lincoln Center and partnered with George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival to put on a series of bicentennial jazz concerts. Now aged 69, Sultan is still alive, reminiscing about Jimi on DVDs and using his musical talents to spread the Christian gospel. He is not hiding under anyone’s rock.
Studio We figures prominently in the little-known but instructive saga of bassist/percussionist Juma Sultan, most widely known for his membership of Jimi Hendrix’s Gypsy Sun And Rainbows (later pared down to the trio of Hendrix, Buddy Miles and Billy Cox, who recorded the album Band Of Gypsys). Sultan pursued an ambitious self-determination agenda spanning concert production, running a studio and educational programmes, largely realised through the Aboriginal Music Society ensemble, which was at the core of Sultan’s partnership with percussionist/woodwinds player Ali Abuwi….
….One of the LPs is devoted to the trio of Sultan, Abuwi and Frank Lowe, a blisteringly intense 1971 set recorded months before the saxophonist’s first sides with Alice Coltrane; Lowe’s rhythmically-charged, thickly textured blowing already putting considerable space between him and the growing pack of late Coltrane influenced tenor players.
– The Wire
…we can be thankful that there were a number of musicians who had the foresight to document broad swaths of their music – record companies’ interest (or lack thereof) be damned. The archives of trumpeter-composer Bill Dixon and drummer Alvin Fielder come to mind, as does that of percussionist, bassist and bandleader Juma Sultan, whose involvement with the lofts, arts communes and self-produced concerts and recordings has left an extraordinarily vast reach of unreleased material that’s just now beginning to appear.
– Signal to Noise Magazine
Mention the name Juma Sultan to most listeners and if it rings a bell at all, they’ll remember him as one of the percussionists in Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock band. A few more may bring up his participation on a handful of releases by Archie Shepp, Noah Howard, and Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre. But until now, only the most avid listener would conjure up the name Aboriginal Music Society. Michael Ehlers and crew have changed all that with the release of this deluxe boxed set comprising two LPs, a CD, and a beautifully produced book, all of which serve to fill in a missing gap in the documentation of the New York loft scene of the 70s.