Im Mai 2021 übernahmen wir die das Sun Ra Archive des Schriftstellers, Kulturkoordinators und Forschers Hartmut Geerken. Es handelt sich um das weltweit umfassendste Privatarchiv zu Leben und Werk des US-amerikanischen Free-Jazz-Pioniers und Vordenkers des Afrofuturismus. Die Sammlung umfasst Bandmitschnitte von knapp 500 bislang unveröffentlichten Konzerten, Interviews und Proben des Sun Ra Arkestra, Filmaufnahmen auf über 70 Videobändern bzw. DVDs, das gesamte dichterische Œuvre Sun Ras, zum Teil mit eigenhändigen Korrekturen, 1.200 Fotos, ein umfassendes Archiv an Sekundärliteratur, Korrespondenz mit führenden Sun Ra-Forschern sowie mit Sun Ra selbst, die Geerken für seine umfangreichen Bücher „Omniverse Sun Ra“ und „The Immeasurable Equation“ verwandte, und vieles mehr.
„Hartmut Geerkens Sun Ra-Archiv ist eine großartige und wichtige Ergänzung der Sammlung des Jazzinstituts“, erklärte damals unser Oberbürgermeister und Kulturdezernent Jochen Partsch. „Sun Ra war ein Vorreiter des Black Power-Movement der 1960er Jahre und damit auch der Black Lives Matter-Bewegung unserer Zeit. Die Sammlung Geerkens, der Sun Ra persönlich kannte und mit vielen Musikern seines Arkestra befreundet war, dokumentiert, wie Sun Ra den Afrofuturismus vorausgedacht hat, der in den 1970er Jahren in der Musik George Clintons nachhallte und ab den 1980er Jahren Teil des internationalen kulturkritischen Diskurses wurde.
In the meantime, we have digitized far more than half of the huge collection; written documents as well as film or audio recordings of his concerts. And the archive is already attracting researchers from all over the world - in March 2023, for example, we hosted a researcher for a documentary planned on Sun Ra by renowned U.S. director Stanley Nelson (cf. Hollywood Reporter). Geerken himself was happy that his collection found a home in Darmstadt, of all places. A radio broadcast by jazz expert Joachim Ernst Berendts, whose estate forms the basis of the archive at the Jazzinstitut, had brought Sun Ra to his attention in the early 1960s, he told us in one of the last telephone conversations we had with him. Only a week later, Geerken died completely unexpectedly in October 2021 at the age of 82 in his home on the Ammersee.
Sun Ra is not only of interest to music historians, but also and particularly to young musicians, who are fascinated by the visions of the bandleader and composer. As early as in the 1950s he succeeded in combining tradition and avant-garde. Ra had his roots in the big band music of the swing era, but quickly became one of the pioneers of freer paths in jazz. The concerts of his Arkestra, some of which lasted for hours, and the contemplation of old African rituals came alive with the colorful costumes, the performance, which always included the audience, and with the rousing hymns that sounded between free improvisations and swinging arrangements. Last but not least, Ra was also a pioneer of electronic music, one of the first musicians to use the Moog synthesizer for live concerts. And in 1986 - another Darmstadt reference - he met the mastermind of new music John Cage at a joint concert in New York.
Sun Ras Musik begleitet uns seither, und auch inhaltlich erahnen wir, wie weitsichtig der Pianist, Komponist und Bandleader war: Wir haben nicht ohne Grund dem 18. Darmstädter Jazzforum, bei dem wir im September 2023 „die Zukunft des Jazz“ einen Titel aus Sun Ras Diskographie gegeben: „Destination Unknown“.
„Space is the Place“ hieß eine der nachhallenden Hymnen, die das Arkestra in seinen Konzerten sang. Das Darmstädter Jazzinstitut hat genügend „space“ freigeräumt in seinen Regalen, um Platz zu schaffen für die Dokumente über eine der schillerndsten und herausragendsten Figuren afro-amerikanischer Musik.
Here are a few examples from the collection:
Prison correspondence
Herman Poole Blount, as he was then known, spent the first 30 years of his life in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was born in 1914. In 1942, he was drafted into military service, which he refused for religious reasons, among others. He served several months first in an Alabama prison, then in a Pennsylvania camp, where he was diagnosed as suicidal as well as "homosexual". Geerken collected copies of Blount's correspondence from those years, in which he speaks candidly about his health problems, but also his sexuality.
The Sun Harp
In Geerken's words (Giza, Egypt, December 1971, from: Omniverse Sun Ra):
the night they were to leave i watched sonny, the chief, sitting behind a little table in the hotel hall. a lit candle in front of him illuminated rows of numbers on a piece of paper. my first thought; magic nurnbers, astrology. but then i heard that there wasn’t enough money to pay the hotel bill. the telephone bill was immense, too. his 21 musicians had made lots of phone calls, like they always did when they were on tour. i know for a fact that once sonny paid the telepone bill amounting to over 1000 dollars with a professional tape, including the rights. – even though it was late at night, i tried to get arabian & german friends to participate in the bill so that sonny & his crew could leave for the airport. they had to pay to be able to leave the building. my friends were reluctant, so i chipped in as much as i could, but it wasn’t enough. one of them kept sneaking outside with something & returning without whatever it was & then handing a few money bills to sonny. sonny would then start adding again. i think june even sold some of her jewelry. she kept laughing & saying: ‚that’s too much! that’s too much!‘ sonny didn’t seem too upset about the precarious situation. how often had he gone through this before? the intergalactic constellation cannot be measured by the standards of earthly time… at some point patrick arrived with a large string instrument, a ukrainian bandura & extra strings to replace the lower strings, handed them to sonny & sonny handed them to me, sort of as a security for the rnoney i had given to him. some tirne when he had rnoney, he said, he would ask me to return the instrument, it was his famous sun harp („STRANGE STRINGS“).
Die Sun Harp ist auf zahlreichen Aufnahmen zu hören, beispielsweise in „Solar Symbols„. Geerken spielt sie 1996 auf seinem „Sun Ra Tribute“ Album; „Sunny’s Sun Harp„.
Sun Ra Hot Dog Sauce
Chris Trent, der erheblich an der zweiten Auflage von „Omniverse – Sun Ra“ mitgearbeitet hatte, schickte Geerken eines Tages diese Flasche. Sie hat nichts mit „unserem“ Sun Ra zu tun, war in den 1940er Jahren eine beliebte Zutat zu … „Hot Dogs.
Maqsud Schukurwali
Geerken's encounter with Sun Ra radiated to everyone he dealt with. Maqsud Shukurwali played guitar in Geerkens Rock and Free Jazz Group, als dieser 1976 für das Goethe-Institut in Afghanistan arbeitete. Schukurwali arbeitet ansonsten als Grafiker und Bildender Künstler; von 1977 stammt seine Maske mit dem Namen „Sun Ra“.
Discographies
„Omniverse – Sun Ra“ ist ja alles: Biographie, Diskographie, Gedichtesammlung, musikalische Einordnung, Reflexion über… Die Grundlagenforschung für all das aber war endlose Korrespondenz, die Geerken mit anderen Sun Ra-Sammlern aus aller Welt führte, die aktive Beteiligung an Mailinglisten, die Veranstaltung regelmäßiger Sun-Ra-Konferenzen. Robert Campbells „The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra“ (zweite Ausgabe: 2001) ist die „Bibel“ für Sun Ra-Sammler, aber in Geerkens Sammlung finden sich auch alle Vorgänger bis zurück zu Otto Flückigers Diskographie in der Zeitschrift „jazz-statistics“ von 1961. Ein besonders schön gestaltetes Werk ist Tilman Stahls privat veröffentlichte Publikation „Sun Ra Materialien / Sun Ra Materials“ aus dem Jahr 1983.
The Sun Ra collection comprises much more - we will come back to this and describe further individual folders and boxes when the opportunity arises, for example the bundle of sheet music or tape cassettes. Oh, one more thing: Even the material that has already been digitized is not available online, but can only be used for research purposes at the Jazzinstitut itself.
(Wolfram Knauer, März 2023)
English 
German