In the Midwest of the United States of America lies a small town called Yellow Springs. The 2010 census counted 3487 inhabitants. Already in the 1950s, the times of Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare, Yellow Springs developed a reputation as a leftist bastion in the midst of white-bread Ohio. The motor of this was an institute of higher education which bears the word anti in its name: Antioch College, a liberal arts college famous and infamous beyond state borders. Antioch is where, between anti-war rallies, black power and flower power, the three original members of The Pyramids met. Idris Ackamoor, Margaux Simmons and Kimathi Asante had followed the call of Cecil Taylor to study music in Yellow Springs and soon Antioch financed those three musicians a cultural research trip that outshines any Erasmus year. From Ohio they went to Paris, from there to the Netherlands, then Malaga, from Morocco to Ghana, from Nairobi to Ethiopia, all in search of African rhythms, masks and costumes. The journey produced scores of photographs, sound recordings, and the very collective that would  record three defining albums melting modern jazz and African poly-rhythmics. Cosmic sound collages, radically globalized free jazz, like the bonus-CD of the Whole Earth Catalog. A leap in time… it’s 2010, The Pyramids have been gone for 33 years. After a bootleg of Birth Speed Merging surfaced in Japan, The Pyramids’ music is being re-released on different labels. Berlin-based concert promoter and friend of our establishment Christoph Linder re-discovers the group and invites them to Europe on three tours. Record label DiskoB from Munich joins the excitement and The Pyramids record a new album. From Berkeley to Boiler Room. The Pyramid’s futurism, globalism and activism are as relevant as they were 40 years ago and their shows, like then, are real happenings.

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