In the early 1970s, many jazz musicians turned to Africa directly for rhythm and inspiration, and a group of students at Antiochia College took it a step further, apparently creating African music. You would have thought it came directly from Kenya or Senegal. It’s not a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Between 1973 and 1976, Pyramid released its own music and sold the album directly to classmates and while traveling. The group gained a few fans, but it was impossible to market the music, the “avant-garde African jazz” that bassist Kimathi Asante called in an interview.
“It was a little too much for people,” said Margot Simmons, who played the flute in a group. “We were very enthusiastic and open and went there.”
On Friday, a new box set entitled “Aomawa: The 1970s Recordings” marks the widest release of pyramid music to date and reintroduces the band’s first three studio albums — “Lalibela” “King among kings” When “Birth / Speed / Merger” — And unearth KQEDTV’s 1975 live session in San Francisco.
Members of the group began to gather after future leader Idris Ackamoor returned to Antioch after a work study in Los Angeles and was taught by saxophonist Charles Tyler. Ackamoor founded a band called Collective with Simmons, which was later joined by Asante. The following year, they performed original songs influenced by Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane in the mid-1960s, and classical music.
In the fall of 1971, the three students joined the Black Music Ensemble, a group initiated by free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor. Those who came to teach in Antioch in the late 1960s, And started a fierce period of music training. “He trained us seven days a week, months, from 10 pm to 2 am,” Asante said. “There was a chop off the chart.”
Nine months after joining Taylor, Akkamore came up with an idea. Antioch had a research program that would allow students to travel abroad, so he wrote a proposal to study the sources of black art. “I said,’I want to go to Europe, I want to form a band, then I want to go to Africa for nine months and study African music,” Akkamoor recalled in a video interview.
The school approved the request and took 6 weeks at a French university. Ackermore and Simmons flew to Paris in July 1972, where they made friends with a young percussionist named Donald Robinson who was studying under drummer Sunny Murray. At the University of Besancon, Akkamoor, Simmons and Asante performed their first show as a trio, and after Robinson officially joined the group, they performed gigs around Amsterdam. In France, they lived in separate dorms forming a triangle and gave the group its name. (An unrelated band called the Pyramid produced surf rock in the 1960s.)
But the most important part of the band’s journey hasn’t come yet. After spending a week in Morocco and Senegal, the Pyramid spent seven months in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, engaged in spiritual practices, playing on drum circles and buying instruments. As African-Americans, when they landed there, almost indescribable emotions began.
“It was a sense of community,” Simmons said. “It came from a place of spirituality, not just to make music.”
“We just wanted to be a ship,” Ackamoor said when the group was in Africa. “We wanted to incorporate as much as we could, but fortunately we were blessed and a good source of information. I was led to. “
The pyramid “transformed” back into Ohio, Asante said. “We weren’t the people or musicians who left Yellow Springs a year ago.” The group enhanced its sound with Moroccan clay drums, bamboo flutes and Uganda harps, and is unique to its music. Gave an African flair.
Returning to Ohio, conga player Bradie Speller joined the pyramid for even more percussive depth. The band played a show on campus and opened for Dayton and Cincinnati’s jazz fusion band Weather Report. The Pyramid emphasized theater and costumes as part of the live show, avoiding streetwear for colorful face paint, ornate Kente cloth, and interpretive dance. “We were doing pageants,” said Ackamoor. “The ritual pageant was a visual feast for eyes, movements and dance, not just music. We were a multimedia spectacle.”
The group’s music had elements that raised awareness similar to experimental jazz celebrities such as Sun Ra Arkestra and Art Ensemble of Chicago. However, Ackamoor said concerns about “humanity” are a top priority. “We were afrocentric, but we never defined ourselves as afrocentric,” he said. “We spoke and spoke to all languages, all colors, all races very early on, but we were African-American.”
Pyramid recorded his debut album “Lalibela” in 1973. Inspired by Akkamore and Simmons’ visit to the city of Ethiopia of the same name, it’s on a four-track tape in the living room of a friend of Yellow Springs. “Most of it was the first take,” Asante said. “It was a very pure album.” Its 1974 follow-up, “King of Kings,” took place during an overnight marathon session at a studio in Chillicothe, Ohio. Both albums include a long percussive suite that works best when the saxophone bark and treble flute solos are played back and forth uninterrupted. The results were and are still bold.
“We were more interested in the advancement of music and the creation of our own sounds,” Speller said in a telephone interview.
By the time the Pyramid recorded their third album, Birth / Speed / Mergeing, in 1976, they had moved to the Bay Area to get closer to some kind of music industry. The Akkamoor brothers, who lived in San Francisco, funded LP and helped place the band in a studio with better equipment and multi-track equipment. The Pyramid printed 5,000 copies of the LP, but couldn’t find a record company to distribute it. After that, the group began to divide and members moved around the world.
Even the most popular jazz musicians were trying to make a living as an avant-garde band when they struggled to find their foothold in a funk-dominated market. “It got deeper,” said Ackamoor. “In the early days, I had to pawn an instrument and do a lot to survive. When we turned red and got out of the college environment, a black creative trying to survive in America. I ran into the reality of a black musician. “The Pyramid opened the Berkeley Jazz Festival in 1977 and then disbanded.
The band wasn’t working until 2007, when Ackamoor held a reunion concert after being asked to republish the Pyramid’s 1970s music. By that time, music had reached a new generation of listeners, and the group’s albums were sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars. Three years later, a German agency organized a European tour for the band.
Since then, Akkamoor has revived the group in various ways: “We Be All Africans” in 2016, “Angel Fell” in 2018, and “Shaman!” In 2020 under the name Idris Ackamoor & Pyramids. But you can’t get these albums without the foundation built by the original pyramids in the 70’s and the courage to step into the unknown.
“We were the original do-it-yourself musician, producer, label, and the entire 9 yards,” Speller said. “Everything a cat is doing now is what it did 50 years ago.”
Ackamoor hasn’t completed the pyramid yet — a new album is in the works — but he said the box set captures a bold moment. “It’s an amazing historical document, but it’s also a living document,” he said. “The past is great, but I am the future and the band is the future.”