Jeff Williams recalls Ant Trip Ceremony's '24 Hours' and the jazz life that followed

It's Psychedelic Baby! Magazine has published an extensive interview with Jeff Williams, the drummer of Ant Trip Ceremony — the Ohio psychedelic rock band whose sole album '24 Hours' appeared in spring 1968 in a private pressing of around 300 copies. Williams, still in high school at the time, was already a working jazz musician who had sat in with Coleman Hawkins and Miles Davis as a teenager. He recounts the band's formation at Oberlin College, the recording sessions on campus, and the strobe-lit college show where he was 'probably the only one there not tripping on acid'.
After Ant Trip Ceremony dissolved, Williams attended Berklee, moved to New York in 1971 and joined Dave Liebman's Free Life Communication collective, spending years with Stan Getz and Lee Konitz in Lookout Farm, recording for ECM and touring internationally. He later worked with Paul Bley and Joe Lovano, taught at the Royal Academy of Music and Birmingham Conservatoire, and now resides in Lisbon.
The interview, conducted by Klemen Breznikar, includes photographs from Williams' 1968 high school yearbook showing Ant Trip Ceremony performing at Oberlin High School. The album has been reissued several times over the decades, most recently by Merlins Nose Records. A full-album upload is available on YouTube via the archival channel No Time To Sleep.



