The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (aka The Ark), founded in 1961 by jazz pianist Horace Tapscott, has been an avant-garde jazz innovator and community magnet in turbulent times. During the 1965 Watts Uprising, The Arkestra played music from a flatbed truck in the streets. On any given weekend, you could find them giving free shows at churches, prisons, and schools. Although Horace Tapscott died in 1999, The Ark continues. They’ve influenced local musical stars like Kendrick Lamar, Thundercat, and Kamasi Washington (who’s played with The Ark).
Drummer Mekala Session grew up in The Ark. Now he’s leading the band. He took over from his father, saxophonist Michael Session, who assumed leadership when Tapscott died in 1999. Their new album is Live at Widney High December 26th, 1971.
Session tells KCRW that South Central Los Angeles lacked a community band in the 1960s, and a place for young Black people to do something positive. Instead of moving to New York to make his career like other aspiring musicians, Tapscott stayed in Los Angeles (where he moved to from his native Houston at age 9) and called his friends to start rehearsals.
“His motto was to preserve the music of Black composers, dead or alive, and to perform this music in our neighborhoods, for our people. ‘This is your band,’ he says that at every show.”
Plus, the “Ark” in “Arkestra” parallels Noah’s Ark, which preserved the lives of people and animals. Tapscott got the spelling from American jazz composer and bandleader Sun Ra, notes Session.
Horace Tapscott plays with the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra at Widney High School in August 1971. The performance was recorded and will be released as an album on May 9, 2025. Photo by Michael Dett Wilcotts. Courtesy of The Village.
Before forming The Ark, Tapscott was well-steeped in the West Coast jazz scene.
“I think he describes in an interview that it's like the silver lining of segregation, where you put all of the Black people in one area, and then suddenly you're a Black person surrounded by other Black people. So you really do get your culture, or you make it up in real time, which is what they did with jazz music,” Session says. “Because you saw cats like Eric Dolphy, you saw cats like Charles Mingus, you could go to a show and be exposed to the culture. And so this is what Horace ended up doing … in Watts and South Central Los Angeles in the 60s, and then again in Leimert Park in the 90s.”
How did Session’s dad get involved? Michael Session grew up poor in Watts and wanted to play the saxophone, but his family couldn’t afford one. Immediately after moving out of his mom’s house, he got one and shortly thereafter went to monthly free concerts at the local church, where he met Horace Tapscott.
“They become very close friends. My father actually didn't really have a father figure in his life. And so Horace became that pretty quickly to him and a bunch of other young cats in The Ark,” Session says.
Horace Tapscott, founder of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (left), plays with Michael Session (right), who took leadership of the band after Tapscott died in 1999. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of The Village.
The men called Tapscott “Papa,” which is also the acronym for the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. “He taught … how to be a soft, understanding Black man, and then also a powerful, proud, self-knowing, self-realized person.”
One track on Live at Widney High December 26th, 1971 is a Tapscott arrangement of a John Coltrane song called “Equinox.” His version is funkier, with a more offbeat groove.
“There's a few things that Tap just did 11 out of 10 over and over and over again. I don't know what's up with this guy in these bass lines. Tap really knew how to make some bass lines, but he kept it simple with this one. I mean, he just plays the melody, and all the horns just chase after him. It's all very simple arrangements. And it plays to the familiarity of the tunes.”
This track is an example of West Coast jazz taking the time to experiment — in contrast to East Coast jazz, where musicians are pressured to be cutting-edge, Session explains.
“It feels like cats that color outside the lines a little more. … You push each other to experiment and to fall, man, on your butt, and then have to figure out how to get back up and then keep charging forward. And then that part becomes the coolest sounding part, where I feel like in New York, it's like, ‘Man, I gotta go home and practice so I never sound like I fall again.’”
Linda Hill is featured on “Motherless Child.” Photographer unknown. Courtesy of The Village.
The song “Motherless Child” is Tapscott’s arrangement of an African American spiritual, featuring singer Linda Hill, The Ark’s first vocalist who ran the choir.
“‘Motherless Child,’ man, this is a really old spiritual. … A lot of these spirituals were just even older African chants in disguise,” Session says. “You couldn't sing in your language because they did awful things to you. They didn't want you to pass it on. So they got ways around it by going to church and learning some of these church hymns, and then disguising their spirituals as, well, spiritual.”
Mekala Session, current leader of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, works the drums at a recording session in 2020. Photo by Samantha Lee. Courtesy of The Village.
As for Mekala Session, who was born in 1995, he started playing drums at age 1. He recalls making a set with pots, pans, and books, and hitting them with branches from the yard. After seeing that for the first time, Session’s dad bought him a drum set and took him to lessons every Monday at Leimert Park’s The World Stage, taught by Billy Higgins.
One day during an Ark rehearsal at his house, drummer Fritz Wise couldn’t attend, so the band encouraged Session, who was 13 years old and knew all the songs, to substitute. After that, he performed in Arkc concerts. “It tripped me out that these adults would talk to me like an adult. I didn't realize that at the time, but looking back, they didn't treat me like a little kid, I was one of the cats, which was really cool.”
Mekala Session plays a little saxophone as his dad watches over him. Courtesy of The Village.
When Session was 22, he took the helm of the Ark. It happened when he decided to do an Ark show for his Cal Arts graduation recital and had to “herd the cats” himself. After a successful performance, his friend suggested he do the same show at a new club called Zebulon that was opening nearby.
“I tell dad that. He's like, ‘Okay, same thing. You call everybody and tell them … then we'll do it.’ So I'm calling rehearsals and do that a couple times, and cats are like, ‘Okay, well, Mekala is leading The Arkc now.’”
Session says of his role, “I'm never gonna sell out, you're not gonna see the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra brought to you by Monster or something crazy. But at the same time, my father is 72 and I am 29. I want to record a bunch of albums and sell them to people that want them, that will pay primo money for these primo records, so I can give it right back to the band. And, yeah, I want to be that insane-looking band that some little kid looks up and goes, ‘What's that one? No, not that one. That one, yeah, the French horn. Yeah, I want to play that.’ … This is the point of the band, to be one of one.”
He adds, “Black excellence, Black wisdom, Black love, unity, and spirit, man. Spirit is real.”
