Afro Futuristic Dreams

Ever since the Strut label resurrected their career, Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids have produced some of the most compelling spiritual world jazz (to coin a label) this side of Pharoah Sanders. Indeed, ‘Re-Memory’ and other passages bear faint echoes of ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan’. Judging by his muscular tenor forays, the septuagenarian saxophonist is in fine fettle, while his band retains their signature sound built around chanted vocals, Bobby Cobb’s sometimes brutal guitar, Margaux Simmons’ flute and Sandra Poindexter’s violin. On the nine long tracks of this sumptuous double LP, they are given ample opportunity to stretch out – less in classic solos, more in the way that the instrumentalists move in and out of Heliocentric Malcolm Catto’s exemplary mix. The album ranges from the mysterious beauty of numbers like ‘Garland Rose’, the staccato ‘Requiem for the Ancestors’ and the kalimba-flavoured ‘Nice It Up’, to the trance-like ‘First Peoples’ and ‘Thank You God’ and the hard-hitting ‘Police Dem’ and ‘Truth to Power’.

The band celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and this ceaselessly inventive release lays down quite some marker. There’s something monumental about Afro Futuristic Dreams, as if The Pyramids were intent on building a musical equivalent for future generations.