“Music is everything to me, it’s also very much a part of my spiritual beliefs. It occupies a lot of my life, even in how I celebrate, how I worship; I worship with music. I conduct rituals on stage with my band, with community, with audience members. Music is about my life.”
Idris Ackamoor in an interview with Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie Zine
Time travelers, spacetime benders, soul gardeners, psychonauts, and cosmonauts alike, take heed: British label Strut Records is back with another outstanding reissue, this time the complete 1970s recordings by SF avant-garde jazz ensemble the Pyramids led by saxophonist Idris Ackamoor. A four-LP box set, Aomawa: The 1970s Recordings compiles the group’s fully restored and remastered studio albums—Lalibela (1973), King of Kings (1974), Birth / Speed / Merging (1976)—as well as their live performance on KQED in 1975.
Originally founded by Ackamoor as part of free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor’s Black Music Ensemble, the Pyramids persist as one of the Bay Area’s most significant participants in the long, rich Afrofuturist tradition most often associated with Sun Ra. This is space jazz knowingly made on planet Earth—conscious of African ancestors, conscious of Indigenous stewardship, conscious of the healing power of music when its makers are allowed to dance and create freely.
