Idris Ackamoor And The Pyramids

Influential jazz collective Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids return withShaman!’, featuring a new line-up including original 1970s Pyramids member Dr. Margaux Simmons on flute, Bobby Cobb on guitar, long-term associate Sandra Poindexter on violin, Ruben Ramos on bass, Gioele Pagliaccia on drums and Jack Yglesias on percussion.

In 2016, California-based tenor saxophonist Idris Ackamoor relaunched his 1970s spiritual-jazz band, The Pyramids, and released a corking new album, We Be All Africans (Strut Records). In spring 2018, he has released another outstanding disc with another almost entirely new line-up. The only musician who is held over from We Be All Africans is violinist Sandra Poindexter, who has replaced Ackamoor's 1970s frontline foil, flautist Margo Simmons. Poindexter's gritty playing, which harks back to the pioneering work of Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians violinist Leroy Jenkins, makes for a perfect fit with Ackamoor's broken-notes and vocalisations.

Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids are back with their first major new studio album in over 3 years, an epic, sprawling new work exploring the future, the past and the urgent reality of the present, ‘Afro Futuristic Dreams’.

In the early 1970s, as many jazz musicians looked directly to Africa for rhythms and inspiration, a group of students from Antioch College pushed even further, creating music that was so overtly African, you would have thought it was coming direct from Kenya or Senegal, not a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Los Angeles staple Carlos Niño teams up with The Pyramids' Idris Ackamoor and guitarist/producer Nate Mercereau, cutting Ackamoor's free-spirited tenor wails with tempered new age percussion and celestial synths.

How does music reflect the times we live in directly or indirectly? They say “Music is a healing force”. Well, the music of my first professional band, The Collective, had a lot to heal for the world of 1971. The times were a’changing! The Vietnam War was raging and on May 4, 1970, four Kent State University students (down the road from Antioch College and the home base of The Collective) were killed and nine injured when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire during a demonstration protesting the Vietnam War. It was barely 3 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Black Panthers Mark Clark and Fred Hampton were gunned down in Chicago on December 4, 1969. All this was happening when I thought to form The Collective in collaboration with Antioch music professor Lester Knibbs and my future wife Margaux Simmons.

About a week after September 11, 2001 (ever to be known as 9/11) I flew into New York City to be a grant panelist for the Rockefeller Foundation’s arts program. Flying into New York the aftermath of the destruction of the Twin Towers could still be seen as an eerie cloud and haze that embraced the site of the attacks. Walking through the streets there were flyers posted everywhere that detailed the names and descriptions of the missing and dead. I sat in a room for the arts panel that gave me a birds eye view of the destruction. This experience of sights, smells, and art in NYC began my European tour of 2001!