Musician Margaux Simmons Spaces Out With Astral Underground

Surrounded by music gear in a cluttered basement, Margaux Simmons clutched her flute and narrowed her eyes, deep in thought. Something about the piece of music she had just played had intrigued her — and the other two musicians in her midst, John Notaro and Ben Maddox.

From his perch behind his drum kit, dark hair buried beneath a baseball cap, Notaro addressed the others: “Should we loop back to the first section again?”

In reply, Maddox hit a chord on his synthesizer, issuing a distorted E minor that rang across the low-ceilinged room.

“Yeah, that seemed to be going where we want it to go,” Maddox said, scratching his dark beard. “Let’s run it back.”

The two men launched into a heavy groove, with Maddox laying out a pulsing bass line on the keys and Notaro springing into action on his kit. They quickly settled into a brooding, cosmic-jazz progression, setting the scene for Simmons.

She brought the flute to her lips and peeled off a cascade of notes, her fingers flying over the keys. Like a thousand fireflies suddenly lighting up a nighttime forest, Simmons’ flute fluttered above Notaro and Maddox’s ominous groove.

It was hardly the first time Simmons had shone a light into the darkness — her career spans more than 50 years. But she might be the first actual legend to play in the Cave of Legends, the rehearsal space below Maddox’s Flying Disc record store and café.

Simmons, 72, is best known as a founding member of the Pyramids, an influential if underappreciated pioneer of Afro-jazz fusion in the 1970s. Hers has been a long and winding journey, from growing up in rural Putney to studying under one of the masters of jazz to playing stages around the globe. Not to mention landing in, of all places, a record store basement in Enosburg Falls.

If that seems an improbable place for her to embark on the latest leg of her musical career, her musical traveling companions are just as unlikely. Maddox and Notaro, both several decades younger than Simmons, are more commonly seen playing in local rock and metal outfits — Maddox with the Mountain Says No, Notaro with Mushroom Teeth. Together, the three form Astral Underground, a genre-bending cosmic-jazz trio — or, as the band describes itself, “celestial jazz from the dark side of the Enosphere.”

Maddox recalled the fateful day in 2020 when Simmons came to see him at the Flying Disc.

“I was immediately blown away,” Maddox said. “How could a top-notch Afro-fusion jazz player just walk into my store like this?”

Simmons had done so on the advice of her partner, Jamy Lasell, with whom she had moved to town in 2019.

“One day, Jamy suggested that I should bring some of the Pyramids albums to the Flying Disc and see if they might sell some CDs,” Simmons said. “I was like, ‘Nobody knows about the Pyramids.’ But I went anyway, and that’s when I met Ben.”

Maddox, a longtime presence in the Vermont music scene, was working on a series of videos called “I See Fish People,” where he shoots underwater footage and composes music to accompany it. He asked Simmons if she wanted to record some music for the series at the Cave of Legends. He also invited his friend Notaro. The three jammed, and there was an instant connection. They formed Astral Underground, releasing their self-titled debut record in 2022, followed by Sunsets Are Sacred in 2024.

While the latest album is jazz-adjacent, Maddox and Notaro add elements of electronica, indie rock, funk and even metal. The varied musical terrain allows Simmons to show off aspects of her playing not necessarily heard on the Pyramids records, where she’s often vying for space with six other musicians. Astral Underground is a launchpad for Simmons to fill voluminous space with her ethereal, dexterous playing.

“Music is a very spiritual thing for me,” Simmons said. “Both the Pyramids and Astral Underground provide me with that connection, which I love so, so much. And it was a connection that I started to make back in college when I met Idris.”

That would be Idris Ackamoor, 74, a cofounder of the Pyramids. He still remembers when he met Simmons in 1971, not long after she started at Antioch College in Ohio.

“I met Margaux on her way to the music department with a flute on her arm,” Ackamoor recalled from his home in San Francisco. “Here I am, 19 years old, and I see this beautiful sister. I said to myself, ‘I need my Alice Coltrane.’ I wanted a partner that would inspire me.”

That she did. The two fell in love and married not long after graduation. But the roots of the Pyramids were planted while they were still at Antioch, studying under free-jazz pioneer and poet Cecil Taylor.

“Studying with Cecil was wild,” Ackamoor said. “He didn’t like to use musical notation or time signatures — he wanted you to play free. It taught us to open ourselves up, and it taught us to look to our ancestry and the music of Africa.”

Through a study-abroad program at Antioch, Ackamoor, Simmons and bassist Kimathi Asante spent the better part of a year traveling in 1972. They went first to Europe, where they met drummer Donald Robinson and formed the original Pyramids lineup. They toured the continent for six weeks. Jazz musician and beat poet Ted Joans was in the crowd for the band’s first show in Amsterdam. In a review that was printed on the back cover of their album King of Kings, released in 1974, he wrote: “Real free music to dig and be dug in return.”

Next, the quartet went to Africa to study the musical cultures of Uganda, Morocco, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Egypt.

“It’s honestly hard to explain just how meaningful that trip was,” Simmons said. “No matter what country we were in, community came and found us. We weren’t playing in nightclubs or hotel lobbies; we were in neighborhoods and countrysides where authentic African music was being made.”

Simmons described herself as “transformed” upon the group’s return to America. Energized, the Pyramids released several albums and played with big acts such as Weather Report before moving to Oakland, Calif., where Simmons and Ackamoor started a family.

“At that point, I was just a broke musician,” Ackamoor said. “I was in the trenches, trying to book gigs and just going from pillar to post. But Margaux wanted to continue her education. She really thrived in that academic world.”

The two separated in 1977, and the Pyramids played their last show of that period at the Berkeley Jazz Festival, alongside Dexter Gordon and Al Jarreau.

Afterward, Simmons immersed herself in academia, earning her PhD in musical composition at the University of California San Diego. She started teaching at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., in 1987, where she remained until retiring in 2007. Then she took a job as a curator at Wounded Knee: The Museum in South Dakota. The work deeply resonated with Simmons, who is of both African and Native American descent.

Though she never stopped playing music, Simmons settled into the life of a scholar, her heady days as part of an avant-garde Afro-jazz outfit seemingly behind her. But deep down, she always felt she’d return to making music.

Around 2007, Ackamoor started getting offers for the Pyramids to regroup and tour in Europe, where their legacy was better remembered than in the U.S. Over the next few years, the Pyramids began releasing albums again — the most recent, Afro Futuristic Dreams, dropped in 2023.

“I was quite young when the Pyramids started — just 19,” Simmons said after the Astral Underground rehearsal in Maddox’s basement studio. “When I see pictures of myself from that time, I seem so demure, always looking at the floor. I’ve grown so much more confident in myself since then.”

A week after that rehearsal, Astral Underground played a gig at Standing Stone Wines in Winooski. As videos that Maddox shot were projected behind the three musicians, they gathered in a triangle — their own pyramid, as it were — and filled the bar with a massive, cosmic jam. Maddox switched between keyboards and guitar as Notaro dropped sophisticated and strangely propulsive beats. Glorying in the expanse of space, Simmons set about doing what she loves most: improvising melodic lines. Her flute cut through the jams like a laser light in a dark room.

If her bandmates felt any pressure trying to match Simmons’ playing or find the right style, they didn’t show it. Instead, the three seemed to meet in the middle stylistically, happily pulling each other in whatever direction the music dictated.

“I definitely had a big learning curve holding down the bass while playing keys and guitar at the same time,” said Maddox, who had some previous experience playing jazz fusion in Mississippi with a band called Cookout.

And though Notaro plays guitar in his other bands, his drumming with Astral Underground is the glue that keeps everything together. At times his playing is experimental and full of subtle cymbal swells. At others, it’s frenetic and hard-charging, pushing the trio into an almost EDM-like vibe.

“I don’t really think about it as ‘jazz’ per se, or anything really — other than the three of us just jamming and making this really unique kind of sound,” Notaro said.

“I just love playing with those guys,” Simmons said. “Ben is so good at exploring sounds with whatever instrument he’s playing, and John is so expressive with all the percussive things he can do. The music seems to start off feeling foreboding and dark, but then we all just grow into the song and it develops these tentacles and becomes something really quite beautiful.”

Simmons is touring with the Pyramids this summer in addition to playing with Astral Underground — they’ll be at Lincoln Park in Enosburg Falls this Monday, June 23 — and working on that band’s third LP. The uniqueness of a resurgent music career in her seventies — and in rural Vermont, no less — is not lost on Simmons.

“Having all this music in my life again is a gift that’s truly saved me more than once,” Simmons said. “And the best part is, there’s more to come.”

This article appears in The Food Issue 2025.

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