Artistic Being

イドリス・アッカムーア率いる伝説のバンド"ザ・ピラミッズ"の結成50周年を記念して、2024年2月の黒人歴史月間にサンフランシスコのThe Labと共同で行ったUnderground Jazz Cabaretでの音源がリリース。
アッカムーアとザ・ピラミッズのメンバーも参加するアンケストラの楽曲をはじめ、俳優ダニー・グローヴァーとローデッサ・ジョーンズをスポークンワードで迎えた「CHINA LANE SUITE」「GRANDMA COLE STORY」、グローヴァーによるオリジナル「IN GOD'S COUNTRY」、そしてアッカムーアの新曲「NOW!」などを披露した貴重なパフォーマンス。

After releasing three bona fide spiritual jazz classics with the Pyramids, bandleader/multi-instrumentalist/composer/dancer Idris Ackamoor retreated from recording for decades. In 2011, he reunited the Pyramids for Otherworldly. After touring, Ackamoors Pyramids signed with the U.K.s Strut for 2016s We Be All Africans. Theyve issued several albums since then, including 2023s Afro Futuristic Dreams. In February 2024, Ackamoors theater/performance art troupe Cultural Odyssey partnered with The Lab, a San Francisco venue, to co-present "Underground Jazz Cabaret" during Black History Month. The performance comprised new and classic works from Idris Ackamoor & Ankhestra -- a big band that includes longtime and new members of the Pyramids including flutist Margaux Simmons, percussionist Bradie Speller, violinist Sandi Poindexter, and bassist Heshima Mark Williams. The libretto fused the history of the Middle Passage to Black Lives Matter to contemporary meditations on freedom. It’s an uncompromising work, combining the Ankhestras spiritual jazzscapes with spoken-word narrations by Hollywood actor Danny Glover and actress, fellow activist, and longtime collaborator Rhodessa Jones. The show opens with a 13-minute "Afro Futuristic Dreams." Introduced by group chant, whispering percussion, and reverb, bass, violin, guitar, piano, and flute, all of which create a mantra-like vamp. Poindexter and Simmons solo atop driving brass. "China Lane Suite," composed of four parts, walks a loopy line between contemporary classical music, jazz, and improvisation. Over 17-minutes long, it relates the tale of an interracial love affair. The music travels from pastorally classical to spiritual jazz intensity before Glover and Jones recite a poignant, powerful narrative as flute, brass, reeds, and bass hover about them. "Tembeka" melds keyboards and strings, joining in a collision of Afrobeat and funky big-band post-bop for over eight steaming minutes. Simmons and Ackamoors solos are deft, labyrinthine, and resonant. The sets centerpiece is "Grandma Cole," delivering Glovers story of a ten-year-old African girl (narrated by Jones) aboard a slave ship. Her arduous journey becomes a revelation as she encounters other Africans and indigenous peoples upon arrival in the New World and finds a grain of resistance within herself. "Thank You God" is another long work crisscrossing Caribbean, West African, and R&B rhythms in a swirl of spiritual jazz and sophisticated soul. The narrators work together on "Prayer for Changing Times," as Ackamoor and the band frame them in a kaleidoscopically spiritual collision of post-bop jazz, blues, carnival, and ritual music, at once demanding and ecstatic. "In Gods Country" was co-written by Glover and Ackamoor. The actors words relate episodes from the life of his mother, buoyed by flute, percussion, bass, and reeds. While "Now" is an irresistible 21st century meld of R&B, spiritual jazz, and samba, the nearly ten-minute closer "Moonlight and Sunshine" is a celebratory benediction where the band deliver blissed-out, soul-drenched, spiritual jazz. Artistic Being reflects the many musical spaces Ackamoor has inhabited. That said, this is no mere look backward. The album uses that creative history as a way of opening up the future to embrace possibilities and avoid pitfalls on the road to liberated self-determination for oppressed peoples. ~ Thom Jurek