Idris Ackamoor

Saxophonist and composer Idris Ackamoor Idris Ackamoor is best-known as the founder and leader of The Pyramids the seminal Afrocentric world music and spiritual jazz group. Born Bruce Baker in 1950, Ackamoor grew up on Chicago's South Side. He fell in love with music early on, and took lessons in saxophone, clarinet, piano, violin, and trumpet. He went on to study with pianist Cecil Taylor at Ohio's Antioch College in the early ‘70s, alongside flautist Margaux Simmons (they were later married) and bassist Kimathi Asante, his original partners in the Pyramids. The group toured Europe and Africa in 1972, collecting a massive number of instruments and adapting the various rhythms and harmonies they heard to free jazz and funk to create the group's signature sound. After releasing three privately pressed LPs the group disbanded in 1977 and for nearly 20 years, Ackamoor threw himself into his work with his San Francisco-based arts organisation Cultural Odyssey, recording only occasionally. In 2012, Ackamoor was awarded a Lifetime Achievement award by the BBC's Gilles Peterson, and released The Beginning of the Second Earth with Cultural Odyssey. In 2016, Ackamoor reconvened the Pyramids for the widely acclaimed We All Be Africans album, recorded by Max Weissenfeldt and released on Strut. After long tours and numerous festival appearances, The Pyramids reconvened in 2018 to record An Angel Fell for Strut as a sextet, and continue to explore new avenues with the 2020 album Shaman!