Rites of Passage: the Pyramids.

Rites
Of
The Pyramids in San Francisco, 1974: Idris Ackamoor (left) and Margaux Simmons
Passage
26 | The Wire | Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids
From left: Heshima Mark Williams, Simmons, Donald Robinson, Ackamoor
From left: Simmons, Kimathi Asante, Williams, Ackamoor
Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids | The Wire | 27
In the 1970s, fired up by
the teachings of Cecil
Taylor in Ohio,
Idris Ackamoor
& The Pyramids
furthered their education
travelling around Africa
to fuse together new
forms of theatre, dance
and Afrocentric music.
Geeta Dayal finds the
flame still burning on
their new album We Be All
Africans
28 | The Wire | Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids
Idris Ackamoor walks down a nondescript block of
Fillmore Street in San Francisco looking like a man
from another planet, another time – nattily dressed in
a lilac coloured dress shirt and sharp grey suit, a hat,
and elaborate pink and purple boots.
We’re walking through the city’s historic Fillmore
Jazz District, where Ackamoor still lives. The area was
once known as the Harlem of the West, but there’s
not a whole lot of jazz left in this neighbourhood
nowadays – the street is dominated by bland
boutiques, restaurants and expensive condos. San
Francisco is currently the most expensive city in the
US, the centrepiece of the seemingly neverending
tech boom. Well-loved landmarks and music venues
are falling one by one. One of the last jazz-related
holdouts – the singular, mystical Church of John
Coltrane – was evicted from its space on Fillmore
Street a few months ago.
Ackamoor is one of the Fillmore Jazz District’s
last remaining holdouts from a previous era, and the
guiding force behind The Pyramids – a rotating cast
of musicians who initially met at Antioch College in
Ohio in 1970. The group’s founding members – alto
saxophonist Ackamoor, bass guitarist Kimathi Asante,
and flute player and dancer Margaux Simmons – met
as students in Cecil Taylor’s Black Music Ensemble,
during Taylor’s influential run as a visiting professor
at Antioch. The Pyramids officially formed on a trip
to France in 1971, where they joined up with the
drummer Donald Robinson, before travelling to Africa,
returning to the US and eventually settling in the San
Francisco Bay Area. The group released three key
albums – Lalibela (1973), King Of Kings (1974) and
Birth/Speed/Merging (1976) – before splintering in
1977. They reformed a few times in the decades that
followed, and many members have come and gone over
the years. But the group are currently touring and
recording with a newly revamped line-up including
Heshima Mark Williams, Kenneth Nash, Babatunde
Lea and Sandy Poindexter alongside Ackamoor
and Asante, and a jubilant new album We Be All
Africans has just been released by Strut. The band
and their associates are currently scattered across
the country, and to hear their story I hook up with
Ackamoor on the West Coast, and call up Asante in
Ohio and Simmons in New Jersey.
Now well into his sixties, Ackamoor himself is
buzzing with energy and ideas. He attributes his
health to several decades spent tap dancing and
working in theatre with his arts group Cultural
Odyssey. We enter his colourful apartment a few
blocks off of Fillmore. A tap dancing floor is installed
in his living room, and next to a piano and two
saxophones a collection of African instruments fills
the wall near the window.
“We Be All Africans has a lot to do with my love
affair with Fela Kuti,” Ackamoor explains. “Fela is one
of my heroes, up there with Coltrane… what Fela and
Bob [Marley] do that a lot of jazz musicians are unable
to do is, they can vocally express a political nature
that is not just expressed through instrumental
music.” The numerous killings of black youths at the
hands of police in the US over the past few years, and
the ensuing Black Lives Matter protest movement,
motivated Ackamoor and his group to make new music.
“When I saw these murders with Trayvon Martin,
and what was happening in Ferguson, and Michael
Brown, I felt, why are we so divided as black, white, or
any colour when we are all in so many ways from the
same human family?” he says. “Africa is one of the
main repositories of human remains, and so for me,
saying ‘We be all Africans’ is saying we are brothers,
sisters – why would you kill this person or shoot down
that person?”
He gestures to another wall in his apartment,
which is lined with hundreds of jazz records, books
and other music ephemera – a veritable jazz library.
But Ackamoor himself doesn’t use the term. “I never
considered myself a jazz musician,” he declares.
“That word – The Art Ensemble Of Chicago never
called their music jazz. It was Great Black Music. Sun
Ra didn’t call his music jazz. Cecil Taylor didn’t call his
music jazz.”
Ackamoor grew up as Bruce Baker, on the South
Side of Chicago in the 1950s and 60s. “My mother was
a schoolteacher, my father worked at the post office,”
he says. “I’ve been playing music all my life, since I
was seven years old.” Chicago’s South Side then as
now is a rough part of town. “I grew up at the time of
the Blackstone Rangers, one of the biggest gangs
that ever existed,” he remembers. “They were highly
organised and deadly, but not as deadly as these guys
are now… growing up in Chicago was always rough. It
wasn’t an easy place to grow up.”
In high school, Ackamoor lost interest in formal
music lessons, embracing basketball and Motown.
The Civil Rights movement was in full swing. “This
was in the big days of Black Power, the Black
Panthers. I graduated high school in 1968, one of
the most incredible years of the 20th century. Martin
Luther King was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was
assassinated, the Chicago Democratic National
Convention Riots.”
After a semester spent playing basketball in a small
college in Iowa, Ackamoor happened upon an article in
Jet magazine about Antioch College, an experimental
school in the small town of Yellow Springs, Ohio,
that had the nation’s first separate black dormitory
and a refreshingly radical curriculum. He applied to
Antioch, first returning back to Chicago to cut his
teeth studying with the pre-eminent clarinettist
Clifford King. “My biggest influence in terms of music,
instrumentally, was my mentor King,” says Ackamoor.
“He was one of the renowned saxophone and
woodwind specialists – a lot of the AACM went to him,
and other older musicians studied with Clifford King.”
King came up during the big band era, playing with
Jimmie Lunceford and other bandleaders in the 1920s
and 30s. Ackamoor would also go on to study in Los
Angeles with Charles Tyler, a member of Albert Ayler’s
quintet.
Meanwhile, Ackamoor’s future bandmate Kimathi
Asante was playing rock ’n’ roll in Ohio, electrified
by the sounds of Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of
Invention, The Fugs, The Rolling Stones and The
Animals. In high school, he formed a band called The
Uncouth Experience, and later joined a group called
Brute Force, a soul jazz outfit also featuring guitarist
Sonny Sharrock. Margaux Simmons was studying
music around the same time, inspired at an early age
by John Coltrane and 20th century composers like
Anton Webern.
Ackamoor, Asante and Simmons converged at
Antioch College, just in time for Cecil Taylor’s
legendary two year teaching stint at the school.
“When Cecil came to Antioch, we were prepared for
Andrew Paynter
him, but Yellow Springs wasn’t prepared for Cecil,”
Asante tells me down the line from Toledo, Ohio. “Cecil
came in with four or five different people to do music,
theatre, poetry and dance – a whole Cecil Taylor
experience.”
An Antioch music professor, John Ronsheim,
had engineered Taylor’s residency in smalltown
Ohio. “Ronsheim was an animated guy who was
completely unorthodox and all about the love of
music,” Ackamoor enthuses. “He so happened to be
Cecil’s roommate at the New England Conservatory
of Music – that’s how he decided to bring Cecil to
Antioch. Cecil brought an entourage. It wasn’t just
music. Cecil was always not just about music. He was
very theatrical. Obviously from his multidisciplinary
posse he brought poetry, dance… he was the epitome
of interdisciplinary work, even before I knew what
interdisciplinary was.”
Taylor set up a Black Music Ensemble, formed
partly of students at Antioch and partly from fans
who showed up from all over the country. Lectures
were held during the day, and rehearsals for the
ensemble happened every day from 10pm–2am. “I
don’t know if you can imagine what it was like – the
cacophony of 30 instruments, young students aged
18–25 playing Cecil’s compositions,” says Asante.
“It was seven days a week, and we built up our chops
to be very strong… Several other musicians who
eventually became Pyramids all participated in that
Cecil experience.”
Taylor’s lectures eloquently and at length delved
into the history and mythos of Africa. “He was talking
poetically, and distilling a lot of information about
African history to us in a very poetic way,” remembers
Margaux Simmons. “It was hard to know what was
actually fact, with his poetry. He gave us a lot of
information about African civilisations – a lot of
information that we didn’t know, that’s not common
knowledge.”
Taylor became a trusted mentor, both in and out
of the classroom. “Cecil was very intellectual, very
thoughtful,” said Asante. “He liked to have fun,
drink his wine when we weren’t performing, liked
to smoke cigarettes and talk about the people he
loved – Betty Carter, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, the
artists who inspired him even though his sound was
totally different… he pushed us to our limits which is
why we became so damn strong. I listened to the early
Pyramids stuff we recorded in Europe, we would play
at peak level for an hour and a quarter, and that’s only
because of our Cecil training. He moulded us to be
strong and creative enough to go wherever we wanted
to go.”
The natural next step for the trio was to strike out on
their own. Ackamoor, Asante and Simmons (who would
marry Ackamoor in 1973) travelled to Europe and,
most crucially, to Africa. After a few months of playing
gigs in Europe, the three moved south to Morocco and
Senegal before settling in Ghana for the next several
months.
The music of West Africa, and particularly Ghana,
was central to The Pyramids’ development. “In Accra,
there was a club called The Napoleon Club where Hugh
Masakela played with Hedzoleh Soundz,” Asante
recalls. “A fantastic place for music, where all the
well-heeled Africans went and the visiting tourists
who wanted to have a good time.” But the music of
Ackamoor in San Francisco
rural people in northern Ghana, particularly of the
Dagomba and the Frafra, was even more transfixing
than the dance music of the big city. “We went to
northern Ghana, which was quite an adventurous trip
in itself,” remembers Simmons. “We started the trip
in a truck filled with people. The trip was only a few
hours long, but the truck broke down a few times, then
the windshield broke. We were on dirt roads, dust was
flying up and the driver kept driving with a cloth tied
around his face. We drove through the night. While
we drove, we could see all these things happening
– trees burning in the forest. We went to a place
called Bolgatanga, and then all the way to Tamale.
We were able to see ceremonies that were going on
there, and we went to some villages and people were
very welcoming to us. They allowed us to play our
instruments with them.”
The Pyramids collected instruments everywhere
they went in Africa, but rather than studying
traditional ways of playing them, they devised their
own idiosyncratic methods. “We were using our own
musicianship to develop our own techniques on
how to play,” Asante tells me. “We were using their
instruments to play a different kind of music that was
totally unusual for them to hear.”
The trip also helped cement their interest in
rhythm. “Because of my African experience, I consider
myself a percussionist,” says Ackamoor. “I’m not a
percussionist like Babatunde Lea or Kenneth Nash
– they’re masters. But sometimes all Pyramids, three
or four Pyramids, we would all break down and play
drums; we would all play percussion instruments.
“I play a thumb piano very differently from the way
a master thumb piano player in Zimbabwe would play
it,” he continues. “A lot of the instruments that I play,
we detune them so that they are intentionally not
played in tune. That creates a whole other element,
an otherworldly character of the music, of the
instrument.”
After a year of travelling throughout the continent,
The Pyramids returned to Ohio in 1973, their lives
changed forever. “We had our own sound, our own
group, our own concept,” Asante declares. “Everyone
who was in the ensemble in Yellow Springs knew that
something mystical and special had happened to
Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids | The Wire | 29
Asante in Toledo, Ohio
us. The European experience performing in France
and Amsterdam and the travels throughout Africa
gathering instruments and costumes and stories… we
came back with something that was really special, and
Cecil recognised that. I think part of him questioned
how anybody could ever leave his ensemble by choice,
but when we came back with our sound he recognised
we were his progeny, that we were meant to do that
thing. The members of Cecil’s ensemble were loyal like
an army – it was really something for us to go off and
do something, but we proved it was worth doing.”
The first Pyramids album Lalibela reflected the
impact of the trip, with its title borrowed from a town
in Ethiopia which Ackamoor and Simmons had visited
for its renowned 12th century stone churches.
Recorded on four-track in Ohio in 1973, the album
was a frugal, bare-bones affair. “That album is
basically live – the way we recorded it and everything
you hear is the real deal,” reports Asante. “We made
500 copies… We were just going door to door selling
them out of our cars or backpacks or whatever, to our
friends.” They sold enough to make their next album
King Of Kings in a 16-track studio. “We recorded all
30 | The Wire | Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids
night long in a studio [near] an old Shawnee burial
ground,” he continues. “It was common for Indian
spirits to flash through every once in a while. We felt
our session was blessed. When we came out in the
morning the sun was shining but it had snowed – it
felt like a very spiritual experience.” The next album,
Birth/Speed/Merging, marked another step up in
fidelity, as they got to record it in a 24-track studio in
the Bay Area.
But footage of The Pyramids’ 1970s concerts is
even more transfixing than the studio recordings.
The gigs were a raucous, rhythmic merger of theatre,
dance and music. The group wore colourful handmade
costumes and elaborate makeup, and they had a
revolving cast of dancers on stage. “The face paint
was our own design,” says Simmons. “It was similar to
what we saw our friends like Art Ensemble doing.”
The dancing didn’t stop – even while recording a
performance at a radio station at Hilversum in Holland
in the early 1970s. “There was an orchestra set up,
and I remember dancing around the orchestra,”
Simmons continues, laughing. “I can’t remember why,
actually. We had to do our whole performance. We
In the 1970s, The Pyramids resettled in the Bay Area,
and took on a new member, Heshima Mark Williams, a
San Francisco native who’s still part of their current
incarnation. “Painting a picture of the 1970s at the
time, imagine a San Francisco where you had Jimi
Hendrix, Santana, Sly Stone,” Williams tell me when I
catch up with him in San Francisco. “Then you had the
Black Panthers, you had the riots at San Francisco
State University – they were fighting for a black
studies programme.
“You had this jazz club, the Both/And,” he
continues. “A preeminent spot, they had Miles, Sun
Ra, Archie Shepp, some of the most incredible jazz
musicians. In Haight Ashbury, Sly and all the R&B
was happening… then Idris shows up. We met at
a loft commune in South Berkeley… that was the
first time I was exposed to The Pyramids. That was a
transformational part of my life.”
But in 1977, The Pyramids fell apart. Williams and
Ackamoor broke up, though they remain in touch to
this day, and the group members went their separate
ways to pursue other projects. The group have
reconvened several times in different line-ups, but
always with Ackamoor as the de facto band leader, and
a 2012 Disko B album They Play To Make Music Fire! is
now followed by brand new record We Be All Africans.
“I see [We Be All Africans] as an evolution,”
asserts Asante. “For one, there are two vocalists
[Sandy Poindexter and Asante] singing words and not
chants, with lyrics. That’s very new. We have Sandy
on violin.” Poindexter, an accomplished violinist
in the Bay Area, played with John Handy for many
years – the noted jazz musician best known for his
work with Charles Mingus in the 1950s and early 60s.
For the past few years she has replaced Simmons,
who has not been able to tour, and her violin adds
an intriguing new element to the band. “Having
three stringed instruments, a percussionist and
saxophonist is a strange instrumentation for any type
of group,” says Asante. “But Idris has these ideas
and concepts and melodies in his head, and he’s able
to communicate with us and get us all to roll along
with it.
“We’re starting to evolve even past We Be All
Africans,” he speculates. “I would think that by next
year we will have taken it someplace else. So The
Pyramids are ancient, but we are still evolving. If I can
slightly misquote Peter Tosh, we are a band of the
past playing in the present and living for the future...
and we’re all over 60 years old!”  Idris Ackamoor &
The Pyramids’ We Be All Africans is released by Strut
Tony Katai
couldn’t just do the music – we did the whole thing.”
The stage shows were intense, almost religious
affairs. “We would create rituals, spiritual happenings
before the eyes of the audience,” says Ackamoor.
“This is what Cecil taught us as well. This idea of
possession in music is an African phenomenon – you
have out of body experiences playing music. Coltrane
with Cosmic Music, Pharoah Sanders with Karma.
When people play ‘out’, out isn’t just crazy. Out is
going to the outermost periphery of the spirit, the
mind, the body. Cecil was very big on this. You are
doing things that are still directed to Africa, this
possession of music, this intensity that Cecil played
with in his music. This intensity can also be looked at
with the drummers playing African music, the dancers,
their bodies are used as vessels for the spirits…”
The Pyramids at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1973