The long careers of artists are sometimes reduced to a single moment. For 82-year-old Juma Sultan, it is the three-and-a-half minutes he spent furiously beating his conga drum beside his friend, Jimi Hendrix, as he reinvented “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock ’69.
While the story of Sultan’s friendship and collaboration with Hendrix is the stuff of legend, there is far more to his life than what transpired at Woodstock on the morning of 18 August 1969.
Before becoming Hendrix’s partner in his creative and social life in Woodstock, Juma Sultan was a key player and compulsive chronicler of New York’s loft jazz scene of the 1960s and 1970s. His 1,500 hours of recorded music and other artifacts from this movement are now housed in institutions, including the libraries of Columbia and Clarkson Universities, the latter of which is thanks in part to a National Education Association grant. Before his time in New York City, Sultan was a catalyst in the early free jazz movement in Los Angeles and Haight-Asbury’s burgeoning psychedelic scene in the months leading up to the Summer of Love.
But Sultan’s most lasting impact may be his continued activity as a creator, archivist, and mentor to a new generation of improvisational-minded musicians in the Hudson Valley and beyond.
From the Spring of 1967, when he arrived, until today, Sultan has been a locus of creativity in Woodstock. On arrival, he became an active participant in the legendary artist cooperative Group 212 and is currently the leader of the long-running ensembles the Aboriginal Music Society and Juma Sultan’s Unification, a Teaching Artist at the Museum at Bethel Woods, the former site of Woodstock ’69 Festival, and much more. He has also been releasing a boatload of new music in collaboration with free jazz veterans like William Parker, Joe McPhee, Daniel Carter, and bassist Michael Bisio, his onetime neighbor at his current address, Lace Mill, a live-work space for artists in Kingston, New York.
Juma Sultan hails from Monrovia, California, and is one of 12 children borne by his mother, Annie May. “Music was always around me,” begins Sultan. “I was forced to participate at an early age in church, forced to take piano lessons to teach me discipline. I wasn’t into it.”
“In elementary school, I played baritone horn and then sousaphone because we couldn’t afford a trombone,” he continues. “I got into music when my dad and uncle opened a restaurant, and I heard things like Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, and Cab Calloway on the jukebox. I had a naturally deep voice and used to sing doo-wop. When I was just a kid, people would give me a nickel to speak in that low voice. Those were probably my first paying gigs!”
While at Pasadena City College, Sultan began to play guitar and sing the blues. “I was a unity cat,” he adds. “I believed in tribal cooperation and became part of the Young People’s Socialist Party. I started to hang out with the Beatniks on Venice Beach, where folk music, jazz, and poetry were the trend. It was at a hootenanny at a commune in Topanga Canyon, where I lived briefly, that I started playing hand drums and percussion.”
Juma Sultan would then catch what he calls “the free jazz” bug from legendary saxophonist Sonny Simmons and his trumpeter wife, Barbara Donald. “They inspired me to start playing bass, which I did along with percussion,” continues Sultan. “We moved to the Bay Area in late ‘65 and jammed incessantly in Golden Gate Park and the Berkeley campus. That’s where I met my longtime friend, Richie Havens.”
Sultan would arrive in New York City in the dead of winter in late 1966. He adds: “It was so cold and snowy and dirty. It was like a coal mine with all the soot in the air. The reason I came to New York was because Sonny Simmons invited me to do a record date with him. He said: ‘You’re never going to make it as a musician if you don’t get to New York.’”
Juma would find an apartment in “Musicians’ Row” on Third Street between Avenues B and C.
“Everybody lived there – Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Dave Burrell, Richie Havens, and so many others. I always carried around my bass, a conga, a bag of flutes and other handmade instruments. All we did was jam. I played with everyone – Albert and Donald Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, James “Blood” Ulmer, Sam Rivers, Frank Lowe, Rashid Ali, and more, on the Lower East and also in lofts in Williamsburg.” It was around this time that Juma Sultan began his inexhaustive documentation of the scene – chronicling the creative goings-on via reel-to-reel tape and cassettes, 8mm film, still photos, concert posters, and other ephemera. Sultan would later be featured on some of the watershed albums of the free jazz genre, including Archie Shepp’s Things Have Got to Change and Attica Blues, Noah Howard’s The Black Ark, and Live at the Village Vanguard.
Renowned jazz bassist William Parker’s association with Juma dates back to these halcyon days. “Not only was Juma a great bassist and percussionist, but he was also a man of ideas and follow-up, someone who built community,” says Parker. “He’s dedicated his life to organizing and guiding younger musicians on how the wild, adventurous sounds we were making were rooted in the blues, with hands reaching out to Africa and beyond. Juma was then – and continues to be today – a true sound warrior.”
Juma would relocate to Woodstock adjacent Saugerties in the late Spring of 1967. Here, he would become involved with the multimedia art collective/retreat, Group 212, a combination living, performing, and educational space founded by artist/educator Bob Liikala. Juma and his Aboriginal Music Society would also participate in the legendary Woodstock Sound-Outs, the modest-sized summer music festivals that began in 1967 and were a direct inspiration for the original Woodstock.
Juma Sultan would briefly meet a pre-stardom Hendrix in Harlem in the mid-1960s, but their most important meeting was at the Village Green in Woodstock in the late Spring of 1969.
“He was sitting on a bench with his manager Michael Jeffreys and shouted, ‘Hey I know you!,” laughs Sultan. “He said he was in town for a few days and wanted to jam, so we did – at his manager’s house. Then he said,” ‘I like it up here and would like to rent a place as I’m playing at this festival in August.’ I helped find him the big manor house in Traver Hollow Road in Boiceville where we partied and rehearsed for the festival”
“Once we got the house, he asked me to help him find musicians,” continues Sultan. “We tried out a bunch of topflight guys who lived locally, including drummer Phillip Wilson of the Paul Butterfield band, but Jimi wasn’t happy. That’s when he called and brought back his original drummer Mitch Mitchell, also his old Army buddy Billy Cox on bass, and a second guitarist, Larry Lee. Truth be told, Jimi was a real sponge, and he picked up quite a bit from Larry.”
“I was still running weekend concerts with my Aboriginal Music Society,” continues Juma Sultan. “We’d meet at noon then go play over at the Tinker Street Cinema from 3:00-5:00pm and also midnight gigs. It was free, improvised music, and Jimi loved it. There are some film and bootleg recordings of one of our sessions about a week before the festival.”
As for the famous Woodstock concert, Juma Sultan has mixed feelings, especially about what was released on vinyl. “We arrived at the concert site at 9:30pm and were supposed to go on at midnight, but they were running way behind, so we opted to play Monday morning,” continues Sultan. “We stayed at Max Yasgur’s house and came on at around six in the morning and played until around 10. It was an awesome experience that seemed to last about 10 minutes.”
“The band, Gypsy Suns & Rainbows, may have looked like improvisation, but it wasn’t,” adds Sultan. “The only thing impromptu was ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. If you look at the film, you will see we were all playing away, but the engineer mixed us out of the released recordings. Jimi’s management didn’t like him going in this direction, into jazz and African rhythms. He was tired of doing all the Are You Experienced material, but his management wanted to keep the cash cow going.”
Proof of this may lie in what happened when Juma went with Jimi to play on the Dick Cavett Show a few weeks after Woodstock. “The road crew were instructed by management to leave my drums at the house,” laughs Sultan. “Luckily, my friend, the drummer Ralph McDonald, lived around the corner and brought me his conga, guiro, and tambourine.”
“Juma is a conga player extraordinaire,” says bassist Billy Cox, his playing partner at Woodstock in Hendrix’s short-lived Gyspy Suns & Rainbows. “Over the years, we have managed to stay in touch. And with his life-long interest in indigenous cultures and sounds, Juma was one of the true pioneers of bringing an appreciation of world music to the West.”
After Woodstock, Sultan would be in and out of the studio with Hendrix and play a few more gigs with Hendrix. He is credited on over a dozen of Hendrix’s albums, including The Cry of Love, Rainbow Bridge, and Valleys of Neptune.
For a time, Sultan would return to New York City in the early 1970s. In 1972, he formed the New York Musicians Organization (NYMO) and Studio We. These were organizations designed to present and document the kind of jazz not accepted in traditional venues like the Newport Jazz Festival. He would also spend a few years in California and North Carolina before returning to the Hudson Valley.
And if it wasn’t for the COVID-19 pandemic, Sultan might be in Africa.
For the past 12 years, Sultan has been collaborating with Sankofa, a drum and dance ensemble led by Maxwell Kofi Donkor of Ghana. An Asante prince who learned the art of drumming from his grandfather, Maxwell’s Sankofa Drum and Dance Ensemble promotes community building and peace through performances and workshop events at schools and festivals.
“I was all set to take up their invitation to visit and maybe move permanently to Ghana, then COVID hit,” says Sultan. “But our work here, and my efforts with them to spread peace and an understanding of Afro-Centric culture, has been a most rewarding experience.”
Thanks, in part, to a grant from the National Education Association, Sultan is on the way to finding a proper home, or rather homes, for his vast archive.
“I’m the Alan Lomax of free jazz, with an archive that spans from 1964 to 1976 and beyond,” continues Sultan. “Clarkson University houses much of the material, and there are maybe 40 boxes with 450 recordings at the Columbia Library of Rare Books. Some of this material, the film, will soon be available when we launch a streaming service for Studio We. I’m also working with a Hudson Valley producer, Eli Winograd, on a record label called Heaven’s Research Unlimited to bring more of this great improvisational music to the world. I’m also keeping the history and spirit alive with a traveling lecture called ‘From Free Jazz to Hendrix.’”
Eli Winograd, a drummer who performs with the current iteration of Juma’s Aboriginal Music Society, is helping him with his archive of recordings and releasing them through the label Heavens Research LTD.
“Juma is, first and foremost, an extremely humble, kind, and morally upright person,” says Winograd. “He’s had a crazy life, met and played music with so many famous and ‘important’ people, but is as far from being a star chaser as he could be – probably to his detriment career-wise. Integrity is what matters more than bragging about or gaining an advantage because of who you’ve known to Juma.”
Winograd continues: ‘Playing music with Juma is a unique experience that I am honored to be able to enjoy. I’d describe him as more of a ‘channeller’ or musical shaman than a ‘musician,’ as we usually use the term in modern times. He would make the most sense as a village sound shaman – playing drums and flutes while the people lay on their backs and gaze at the Milky Way or something like that. What he brings to a group of musicians is truly extraordinary, but it’s not the type of toolkit that tends to translate to commercial success in the music business.”
Lee Falco is a young drummer/producer who has known Juma Sultan since childhood. With the death of his father, Tony, from COVID-19 in 2021, the younger Falco has assumed booking duties at the Woodstock-area venue, The Falcon, where Sultan plays frequently.
“Juma is one of the most soulful people I know, who always radiates love and wisdom,” adds Falco. “He’s also one of the hippest octogenarians you could ever wish to meet. Juma always brings a great band of players to our stage — most who are more than half his age. He’s a true treasure we’re lucky to have here in the Hudson Valley.”
Another concert promoter, Mike Amari of Chosen Family Presents, concurs. “We did a show here last year with his band at Opus 40 sculpture park, and I can tell you he’s as sharp as ever.”
Suzanne Morris, the Senior Director of Education Programs at the Museum at Bethel Woods, also received high praise.
“Juma has graciously offered his time as a special guest in our P.L.A.Y. Rock Camp program since its inception, says Morris. “He created a workshop that combines storytelling about his experiences playing with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock and the lessons he’s learned as a musician with the history of African drumming, including its signature percussive instruments, rhythms, and sounds. The students take away not only the connection to history that Juma provides but an unforgettable experience of playing with a Woodstock legend.”
Knowing that the clock is ticking, Sultan is now finalizing his memoir. “I’ve seen a lot in my 82 years on this planet,” he writes in his book. “I’ve seen my fellow humans create the most beautiful ideas, sentiments, and objects.”
He continues: “In a spiritual sense, I’ve explored about every set of beliefs throughout my life. I know that my mind and spirit are connected to whatever created the heavens and earth, and music is connected to it, too. That is something that has been proven to me time and time again.”
On 14 August, Juma Sultan completed the circle with a performance by his Aboriginal Music Society at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, the site of Woodstock ’69.