King of Kings is a lost 1974 spiritual jazz-funk masterpiece from an Ohio commune that sounds like the sun coming up — dense polyrhythms, ecstatic saxophone, and a horn fanfare that could raise the dead. This is the album you play when you want to believe in the power of collective creation.
The first time I heard the opening horn fanfare of “King of Kings,” I was standing in a friend’s basement in 2005. He put the needle down on a beat-up copy, and for the next ten minutes I didn’t move. The air got thick. The floorboards seemed to vibrate. I had never heard anything like it.
That fanfare is still the best entry point. Four notes, repeated with growing intensity, then the congas drop and Idris Ackamoor’s alto sax comes in like a man shouting from the top of a hill. The track unfolds for nearly eleven minutes, but it never drags. Every few bars, something new enters — a flute line, a hand drum, a bass figure that seems to lock in with the earth’s rotation.
The Pyramids came together at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the late sixties. They were a multiracial commune living on a farm, practicing music from dawn until dusk. Idris Ackamoor led the group on alto sax and flute. Margaux Simmons played flute, piano, and sang. Kimathi Asante held down the bass and percussion. The drummer, Nashid, kept a loose, rolling pocket that sounded like it was invented on the spot.
They recorded King of Kings in a converted barn on that same farm. The engineer was a local named Larry K. Jones, who had never recorded a full band before. He set up mics wherever they fit — one room, live bleed everywhere, no isolation. The tape ran hot, the mix breathes, and you can hear the scrape of fingers on drum heads and the creak of wooden floorboards. It’s the sound of people playing together in a room, not layers stacked in a city studio.
Side one opens with the title track and “People Get Ready,” a cover of the Curtis Mayfield song. The Pyramids turn it into something heavier, slower, almost devotional. Simmons plays a flute solo that sounds like wind through tall grass. Side two runs “Marching Through the Mist” into “The Voyage,” then closes with “What Is Africa to Me?” — a question, not an answer.
The album was pressed in a tiny run on their own Pyramid label. Maybe 500 copies. Most ended up in bins in Ohio and Michigan. A few made it to New York. The rest vanished. For decades, it was a holy grail for collectors of spiritual jazz and deep funk. Reissues came in the early 2000s, first on a small UK label, then properly from Now-Again. If you have one of those, you’re fine. If you have an original, you probably don’t need this review.
What makes King of Kings endure is the purity of its intent. No label interference. No producer telling them to shorten a solo. They recorded what they lived — a belief that music could be both earthy and transcendent, political and prayerful. The album never settles into one mood. “People Get Ready” is a call. “The Voyage” is a journey that gets lost on purpose. “What Is Africa to Me?” pulls from Langston Hughes and feels like a meditation on identity played at sunrise.
Ackamoor’s saxophone is the anchor. He plays with a tone that is slightly raw, always on the edge of breaking. He doesn’t flash. He states a melody, then repeats it until it becomes a mantra. When he finally lets the horns swell in the title track, it feels earned.
Forty years later, The Pyramids reunited and still tour. Ackamoor leads the band with the same fire. But King of Kings captures them at the exact moment when the commune was still a dream and the music was still being invented. Put it on loud. Let the fanfare hit you. Then sit still for the rest.