root salad Idris Ackamoor & R
esplendent in shiny spacey cos- tumes, Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids are in full, pulsating flow at North London venue The
Dome, mixing free-blowing jazz with deep folkloric African roots, heavy funk and dub. Yes, there are lots out there dabbling with similar musical ingredients, but the Pyra- mids have been doing it much longer and far better than pretty well anyone else.
Originally formed in the early 1970s, they split up a few years later. Getting back together in 2007 in response to the renewed interest in their ’70s recordings, they’ve since released two albums on UK’s Strut Records, the most recent of which, 2018’s An Angel Fell is getting a thoroughly deserved live rolling out tonight.
Backstage a couple of hours earlier and Mr Ackamoor is more than happy to give generously of his time, talking through his career. And what a career it is. Now 67 (though you wouldn’t know it), he’s a sax player, singer, composer, theatre director, community activist and tap dancer. “I consider myself an artistic being,” he explains. “I’ve been playing music since I was seven years old.”
Idris grew up in Chicago, coming of age in 1968, when the Civil Rights movement and Afro-centrism were burning at their brightest. The Pyramids were formed in 1972 with fellow students of Antioch Col- lege, Ohio. “At that time, it was one of the most experimental colleges in the nation,” he tells me. “I wrote a proposal that I want- ed to go to Europe for a year to form a band… and they fell for it! We actually went to Europe for three months and then travelled in Africa for nine.”
Those months immersing themselves in various rhythms from across Africa explain a lot. Whereas many jazzers employ African rhythms as an exotic (usually unconvincing) musical adornment, the Pyramids have got the beat of the Motherland at the very heart of their sound. At Antioch, they were taught by avant-garde jazz maven Cecil Tay- lor, who was as interested in the trance- inducing energy of African drumming as he was in out-there improvisation. So, by the time they touched down in Africa, the Pyra- mids were good and ready to soak it all up.
“We started in Morocco,” Idris recalls. “Stopped briefly in Dakar, Senegal and then landed in Accra, Ghana. That’s where we spent three months. We travelled to North- ern Ghana, to Bolgatanga. I visited the Fra Fra people there and went through a ritual called The Washing Of The Legs. The first
71 f
The Pyramids Jazz meets African folkloric roots? Yes, sez Jamie Renton
song on our new album, Tanoge, is from the Fra Fra people. We also performed with the King’s Drummers of the court of the Dagum- ba people in Tamale. Then travelled to Ugan- da and got to Kampala right at the time that Idi Amin was coming to power!” From there, they moved on to Kenya. “We lived on a cof- fee estate outside of Nairobi, where we stud- ied music with the Masai people and the Kikuyu. We stayed there for three months and then went up through Ethiopia.”
B
ack in the US after this life-chang- ing trip, they relocated to San Francisco, immersing themselves in the West Coast scene and self-
releasing a trio of albums before calling it a day in 1977. Following this, Idris focused more on straight-ahead jazz, before found- ing the multi-disciplinary arts organisation Cultural Odyssey in 1979, which allowed him to explore his growing interest in socially conscious musical theatre.
Fast-forward to the early years of this century and Idris was receiving an increas- ing number of inquiries about those old Pyramids albums, which were starting to go for big money on eBay. In 2007, a Japanese label asked him to put together a double CD career retrospective, inspiring Idris to get the Pyramids back together to give a one-off performance at the release party in
San Francisco, as a result of which they were booked to tour Germany and haven’t looked back since. “The band has now been together longer in the afterlife than we were when we first got together.”
Made up of a mixture of original mem- bers and young initiates, the six-piece Pyra- mids are definitely musical kindred spirits. Improvising over those African rhythms, adding vocal chants and poetry, Idris likens their sound to an abstract painting. “Any- one can interpret our lyrics in their own way. Just like if you’re looking at a beautiful painting, you can take your own concept from it. I know what it’s about, but I like keeping it open for people to put their own interpretation.”
An Angel Fell was recorded in London with producer Malcolm Catto (of UK Afro- jazz explorers The Heliocentrics) at his Quatermass Studios. For all his interest in lyrical ambiguities, much of the album is direct in its social comment. Soliloquy For Michael Brown is self-explanatory, whilst Message For My People was composed after Hurricane Katrina. Warrior Dance was inspired by the protest movement within the Native American community. “My motto is ‘art for social action’”.
strut-records.com F
Photo: Alexis Maryon
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148
