Fully remastered editions of their three LPs Lalibela, King of Kings, and Birth/Speed/Merging, in their original artwork; plus the first ever vinyl issue of their live session for KQED TV in 1975. The accompanying 12-page full-size booklet features extended interviews with The Pyramids alongside previously unseen photos from the archive of Idris Ackamoor.
‘Jazz musicians in the US had long been consciously engaging with African sources, concepts, and instruments, and by the early 1970s, Africa was a central reference point for the music, both sonically and philosophically but, by 1973, relatively few prominent jazz musicians had spent any significant time in Africa. The Pyramids were almost alone among their musical generation in journeying to Africa to expressly absorb the sounds, cultures, places and spaces of the continent. During 1972-3, they embarked on an African trip of several months — made possible through the work-study program at Antioch College, where they had been taught by Cecil Taylor — to Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia and Egypt. The experience was both musically and personally transformative and remained a crucial touchstone for their own work.
‘Their music is unique among the varied canon of avant-garde and experimental music of 1970s America: high intensity African-styled percussion topped with songs, chants, and horns, laced with African instruments and arranged into long, flowing suites that surge and roll.’

Their last record, from 1975 — ‘a psychedelic afrojazz stunner… celebratory, carnivalesque and wholly in the groove. Features the burning classic Black Man And Woman Of The Nile.’

Cut in Ohio in 1973 after Idris and Margot Ackamoor, Kimathi Asante, and Donald Robinson returned from a trip to Africa — ‘an urgent, beautiful and massive two track suite of propulsive afrodelic cosmic earth groove’.