We believed that the way to break the ghetto mindset was to introduce a new set of rituals. The Pyramids weren’t a jazz band the way most people envisioned one. We were all about ritual, costumes, and magic. In that respect, we were like Sun Ra. But we’d actually learned it from going to Africa.
-Idris Ackamoor
Back in the late 1970s, I remember seeing something odd at the time. A man was singing a song on TV. It was a song I had heard Glen Campbell sing on the radio, which isn’t so strange. But he was also tap dancing and playing the banjo. That amazed me. Many years later, I discovered that the singer was John Hartford. This might be the TV show I saw:
I had seen many tap dancers before and was a tap dancer myself - inspired in grade school to follow in the footsteps of Fred Astaire. But that was the first time I’d seen someone tap dance while playing an instrument and on top of that singing.
I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something about the tap dancing accompaniment of a solo performance. It’s much more than just the novelty of it, although showmanship certainly plays a part. You just don’t see it much. I suppose it has more to do with that old-time tradition - a step back in time that appeals to me.
I was reminded of John Hartford when I recently ran across this video:
The artist is Idris Ackamoor, performing his simultaneous tap dance and saxophone act to Round Midnight at the 2007 National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The biennial National Black Theatre Festival, now known as the International Black Theatre Festival, brings more than 65,000 theatre-lovers to town for a "Marvtastic" celebration and reunion of spirit. "Marvtastic" is a word coined by Larry Leon Hamlin, who founded the North Carolina Black Repertory Company (NC Black Rep) in 1979, the first professional Black theatre company in the State of North Carolina.
Hamlin was distressed by the dire straits of Black theatre companies across the country and decided to take on a new challenge. With the help of Maya Angelou, who happened to be a Winston-Salem resident and professor at Wake Forest University, they created the National Black Theatre festival (NBTF), the inaugural festival was held August 14-20, 1989, and its theme was “A Celebration and Reunion of Spirit.” This year’s festival will be held on July 29-August 3, 2024 in Winston-Salem.
Hamlin’s formation of the North Carolina Black Repertory Company reminds me of Cecil Taylor’s formation of the Black Music Ensemble at Antioch College in Ohio in 1968. One of his students was Idris Ackamoor.
This week on that Big River called Jazz, we follow the early journey of Ackamoor’s group The Pyramids.
Born Bruce Baker in Chicago in 1951, Idris Ackamoor grew up and went to high school in the South Side of Chicago. He was mostly classically trained. Although he never joined the AACM, he took classes there with Roscoe Mitchell.
In 1968, he left Chicago on a basketball scholarship at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. However, it was at Coe College that he had an epiphany. In a 2020 interview he said, “1968 was right in the middle of the Black Power movement, in the middle of the Black Panthers coming out, of black consciousness. I was growing my afro, I was wearing a beard, I was wearing a dashiki. Those things didn’t go with being a college jock. My heart told me to get back into music.”
He returned to Chicago and studied with the legendary Chicago clarinetist Clifford King, who got his start in the 1920s playing with New Orleans jazz patriarchs Jelly Roll Morton and Freddie Keppard and played in Jimmie Lunceford’s orchestra. King taught him alto and tenor saxophone.
In 1970, he left Chicago to study music at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Antioch was well known for their Cooperative Education (Co-op) Program, a progressive education model that combined classroom-based education with field experience. As part of his work-study program, he went to Los Angeles, where he met and studied with saxophonist Charles Tyler.
While Ackamoor was in Los Angles, Cecil Taylor began teaching in the music program at Antioch. He was invited there by professor John Ronsheim. They had been friends twenty years earlier at the New England Conservatory of Music. You can listen to the Cecil Taylor Quartet on a radio program called “Live Music at Antioch” broadcasted on February 10, 1969 from Antioch College. At the center of Taylor’s work at Antioch was the Black Music Ensemble, an orchestra of students who could create large scale works along with Taylor and his band members saxophonist Jimmy Lyons and drummer Andrew Cyrille.
When Ackamoor returned to Antioch, he met Margaux Simmons and in the Fall of 1971 they joined Taylor’s Black Music Ensemble. Ackamoor recalls, “Cecil taught us that jazz was part of an ancient musical continuum going back to Africa… He said playing piano was like playing eighty-eight tuned drum. In class Cecil would say ‘go to Africa.’ He confirmed the importance of Africa.” They formed a band called the Collective, which was later joined by bassist Kimathi Asante. This is Simmons in 1970 performing as part of the Collective:
And here’s a song from the Collective called Black Queen:
In late 1972, as part of their Study Abroad Program, Ackamoor, Simmons, and Asante received travel money and a monthly stipend to travel to Africa. Their first stop was Paris where they met Donald Robinson, who was studying with Sunny Murray. Later in Amsterdam, Robinson joined the band and they became The Pyramids. Ackamoor recalls that trip and the formation of their band. “The only academic thing we had to do was go to Paris and study French for six weeks first. After that we went to Amsterdam, where we founded The Pyramids. Then we went to Africa - to Tangier, Morocco for a couple of weeks, the Dakar, Senegal for a couple of weeks and then we settled in Accra, Ghana. From there we went to Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. We spent around a year in Africa.”
Here is Ackamoor in 1973 in Ghana:
At the end of the study abroad program, Ackamoor and Simmons visited Ethiopia, where they toured ancient sites like Lalibela and the rock churches:
In a 2022 interview in the New York Times, Asante recalled, “We were not the people or the musicians that had left Yellow Springs a year before.” They returned transformed, accompanied by, for example, Moroccan clay drums, a bamboo flute, and Ugandan harp.
When they returned to Antioch, Ackamoor, Simmons, and Asante were eager to start performing. Joined by conga player, drummer, and percussionist Bradie Speller (Hekaptah), drummer and percussionist Marcel Lytle, and soprano saxophonist and flutist Tony Owens (Masai), they played shows on campus and in Dayton, Springfield and Cincinnati. They even opened for Weather Report at Dayton and Cincinnati concerts. By the end of 1973, it was time for The Pyramids to record their debut album, Lalibela:
The group gathered at a friend’s living room in Yellow Springs and recorded two suites on four-track tape. I’m assuming that was at Duane Schumacher’s place, as he’s listed as the Producer on the album and it was recorded and mixed at “Schumacher's Studios.” Each suite made up one side of the record: Side A Lalibela and Side B Indigo. Asante recalls, “A lot of it was on first takes. It was a pure album.” From that session, here is Indigo Suite 3: Sunset at Giza:
In the spirit of Sun Ra’s Saturn label, The Pyramids released all three of their albums on Pyramid Records, their independent artist-owned record label:
All the albums were pressed in limited quantities of 1000 and sold at gigs.
Their second album, King Of Kings, was released in 1974:
It was recorded at the 16-track Appalachia Sound Recording Studio in Chillicothe, Ohio in March 1974. From that album here is Queen of the Spirits, with Ackamoor playing the calypso box:
In the Summer 1974, Ackamoor and Simmons moved to Oakland, California and started performing in the Bay Area. Here are Simmons and Ackamoor in San Francisco during 1975 rehearsals for their third and final album, Birth/Speed/Merging:
Birth/Speed/Merging was released in 1976:
It was recorded at His Master’s Wheels Studio, founded by producer Elliot Mazer in January 1973 as a mobile recording truck first built in order to record a Neil Young tour, which resulted in the album Time Fades Away. In October 1973 it moved to a permanent location in San Francisco. Here are Birth/Speed/Merging parts 1 & 3:
After leaving college and trying to make it as musicians on their own, reality stepped in and The Pyramids performed their last concert at the 1977 UC Berkeley Jazz Festival. After the band broke up, Ackamoor stayed in California and formed a non-profit organization called Cultural Odyssey to support performing arts, which is still going strong today.
Here’s one more for the road. In 2010, Ackamoor re-formed The Pyramids and recorded Otherworldly on his Cultural Odyssey label and in 2016 began recording a number of fine albums on the Strut Records label. Here’s the more recent version of The Pyramids playing Tango of Love from their 2020 release Shaman!:
Today, along with Rhodessa Jones, Co-Artistic Director of Cultural Odyssey, Ackamoor continues to dance a tango of love throughout the performing arts world. For example, Jones founded and directs The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, an award-winning performance workshop committed to the personal and social transformation of women, now in it’s 23rd year. What a wonderful legacy and one worth recognition during Black History Month.
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of Phil Cohran.
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Thanks again for introducing me to a fantastic band that I had never heard of. I loved Cecil's comment that a piano is an 88 tuned drum. He certainly drummed a piano like no one else ever has. 👍😎👍