Marshall receiving the Blue Bird Award 2004 at Muddy's Club, Weinheim

Press release: Marshall Allen and the Sun Ra Arkestra, and Jakob Köllhofer, spokesman for all the America Institutes in Germany, are to receive the Blue Bird Award 2004 from Muddys Club, Weinheim, for their commitment to blues and jazz.

On March 1, the Sun Ra Arkestra under the leadership of Marshall Allen will blaze off to Saturn and beyond on intergalactic warp drive in a concert at Weinheim’s Muddys Club. The concert marks the receipt of the Blue Bird Award 2004, given for the Philadelphia big band’s life work. This will be a unique opportunity to experience the Arkestra in a club atmosphere. Jakob Köllhofer will likewise receive a Blue Bird for his cultural work, which has constantly pushed jazz and blues to the fore as the expression of a unique approach to life. The awards will be presented by Heidelberg Professor of Sociology Rainer Lepsius and Mike Hennessey, jazz pianist and long-standing editor of Billboard magazine.

Since 1984, the famed blues and jazz club has presented the Blue Bird Award to people who have rendered outstanding services to jazz and blues, including notable musicians such as Billy Cobham, Eddi Palmieri and James Blood Ulmer. This year the award will be presented to Marshall Allen and the Sun Ra Arkestra, and to Jakob Köllhofer, who have peerlessly kept the flame of jazz and blues alight and passed it on to others, as the artistic director of Muddys Club, Ben Schmidt, stated.

Under the leadership of the incomparable 80 year-old sax-player Marshall Allen, the Sun Ra Arkestra has not simply kept the music of its legendary founder Sun Ra alive, but also developed it. In the 50 years of its existence, the Arkestra has created its own distinctive culture in which a musical legacy is handed on from generation to generation. The Sun Ra Arkestra stands alone in the way it has perpetuated a major element of the jazz, blues, and Afro-American culture – the oral tradition. Musicians such as John Coltrane drew inspiration from the Sun Ra Arkestra in the 1950s, and rock bands like Sonic Youth, or more recently the Shibusashirazu Orchestra, Tokyo’s leading avant-garde jazz ensemble, have been no less galvanized by the spirit of the Arkestra.

The award will also be presented to Jakob Köllhofer, director of the German-American Institute in Heidelberg and spokesman for all America Centers in Germany, for his work in championing the free spirit. For Köllhofer, jazz and blues have an outstanding place in social life because they embody a finely shaded view of life. During the 1980s, when jazz was nowhere to be heard in Heidelberg, Köllhofer founded the "Gesellschaft für kreative Musik" (Association for Creative Music, transl.), which later became the Heidelberg Jazzclub, and succeeded in promoting jazz and blues in the face of a prevailing monoculture. In times of rapid polarisation, one of Köllhofer’s chief concerns has been to instil a sense of pluralism in the public’s mind. At the same, he has never forgotten the limits set to rationality in such an enterprise. Which is why Köllhofer has always summoned music and poetry as correctives to today’s over-achiever mentality. For him, music is the silken thread that holds the world together and enables us to survive – and not some easily consumable product. Culture, like democracy, is never a finished project, for it must be charted each day anew. Music teaches us to sharpen our ears to the concerns of others – a kind of sensitivity that Köllhofer would like to see among politicians and the powers that be.

The Arkestra, Jakob Köllhofer and Muddy's Club people