Otherworldly

The Pyramids formed at Antioch College, Ohio in 1972 as an avant– garde cosmic jazz band, influenced by the likes of Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders. The following year they headed for Africa, where they spent nine months in Ethiopia, Kenya and Ghana, playing with local musicians, collecting strange instruments and generally imbibing African culture. After their travels, they returned to the US and recorded three albums of ‘world jazz’, heavily influenced by their travels. They broke up in 1977 but recently reformed to record their first album in 35 years. Driven by a battery of esoteric African percussion and an unusual thrumming combination of acoustic and live bass, over which alto saxophonist Idris Ackamoor riffs with an invention uninhibited by conventional notions of line and form, the result is an extraordinary global maelstrom of Afro-funk workouts, free jazz blowing, modal modulations, cosmic juju and ‘yes we can’ conscious rapping about how to stop war, pollution, greed and the other ills assailing our world and preventing us behaving like the brothers and sisters we all are if we only knew it. Pretty much what they did all those years ago, then. One might have expected the passage of time to have changed our perceptions; the law of progress should mean that what was avant-garde four decades ago should seem like regular fare today. Yet the Pyramids still sound bafflingly out there, impressionistic, otherworldly and deep. There are some thrilling moments, but they're shrouded in so many layers of obscure cosmic meandering that it takes patience to access them. Persist and you will be rewarded. Eventually.