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King Crimson

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For the Stephen King character, see Crimson King.
King Crimson
File:IntheCourtoftheCrimsonKing.jpg
The famous cover of King Crimson's debut album In the Court of the Crimson King.
Background information
OriginEngland
Years active1969-1974, 1981-1984, 1994-present
MembersRobert Fripp
Adrian Belew
Tony Levin
Pat Mastelotto

King Crimson is a musical group founded by guitarist Robert Fripp and drummer Michael Giles in 1969.

Their dense musical style has typically been categorised as progressive rock and math rock, though it has held strong leanings towards jazz, classical, new wave, heavy metal and folk. Though its membership has fluctuated considerably during its lifetime, the band continues to perform and record music. The name King Crimson was coined by Peter Sinfield as a synonym for Beelzebub, prince of demons; according to Fripp, Beelzebub would be an anglicised form of the Arabic phrase "B'il Sabab", meaning "the man with an aim".[1], although it is widely accepted that the word is from Hebrew Ba'al-z'bub meaning "lord of the flies" [2].

A considerable amount of King Crimson's history consists of the various personnel changes that have occurred within the group. Throughout its history, Robert Fripp has been the only consistent member, although he has stated that he does not necessarily consider himself the band's leader. To him King Crimson "is a way of doing things" [3], and the musical consistency that has persisted throughout the band's history, despite frequent rotation of its members, reflects this point of view.

King Crimson has found little success in the way of radio or music video presence, but they have a vast discography, tour frequently, and have a devoted following.

Band history

Origins

Robert Fripp and Michael Giles began discussing the formation of King Crimson in November of 1968, soon before the breakup of the short-lived and unsuccessful band Giles, Giles and Fripp. The first musician to be added to the lineup was multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald. Lyricist Peter Sinfield and Singer-guitarist Greg Lake, who was to play bass and sing, were soon recruited afterward; thus the first incarnation of King Crimson was born.

Early in January 1969, the group rehearsed for the first time. The group's high-profile premiere took place at the famous free concert in Hyde Park, London, staged by The Rolling Stones in July 1969. The first King Crimson album, In the Court of the Crimson King was released in October (and received public compliments from guitarist Pete Townshend).

King Crimson went on tour through England, and later the United States, performing alongside many contemporary popular musicians and musical groups, including Iron Butterfly, Janis Joplin, The Rolling Stones, and Fleetwood Mac. Tensions and musical differences within the band eventually reached a limit, however; Ian McDonald and Michael Giles left the band in December 1969 to pursue solo work. In 1970, they recorded the McDonald and Giles studio album. McDonald went on to be a founding member of Foreigner in 1976.

1970s

File:KC newspaper.jpg
A page from Melody Maker announcing Mike Giles and Ian McDonald leaving the group

King Crimson's lineup fluctuated tremendously during the next few years. The remaining trio of Fripp, Sinfield, and Lake persevered for a short while, releasing the single Cat Food/Groon in March of 1970. During this time, material was being developed for King Crimson's second album, In the Wake of Poseidon. Woodwind player Mel Collins came on board, and bassist Peter Giles appeared on several tracks. Greg Lake departed in April to form Emerson, Lake & Palmer, leaving King Crimson without a vocalist until Gordon Haskell took over singing, in addition to playing bass, for the band's third album, Lizard. Andy McCulloch played drums for the album, with Jon Anderson of Yes appearing on one song. Haskell and McCulloch left just before the release of Lizard, leaving King Crimson in the unenviable position of being a rock band without a singer, bassist, or drummer.

Fripp and Sinfield began auditioning vocalists and musicians. Among the singers who tried out for them was young Bryan Ferry, leader of the fledgling band Roxy Music. While his voice wasn't right for King Crimson's material, both Fripp and Sinfield were highly impressed by Ferry's performance, and they helped Roxy Music obtain a recording contract with E.G. Records. (Sinfield would go on to produce the first Roxy Music LP.)

Drummer Ian Wallace and vocalist Boz Burrell were selected, but after more than two dozen potential bassists had come and gone, Fripp decided simply to teach Boz to play bass. Burrell maintains that he was chosen because he preferred the more "twangy" Rotosound brand of strings. In the midst of the lengthy tour that followed, the band released Islands in 1971. At the end of that year, King Crimson parted ways with long-time member and lyricist Peter Sinfield, who then hooked up with old friend Greg Lake, and became the primary lyricist for Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The remaining members undertook a tour the following year, with the intention of disbanding afterwards. Recordings from this tour were later edited by Fripp to become the Earthbound album.

Shortly after the Earthbound tour, Collins, Wallace and Burrell left King Crimson to form a band called Snape, with British blues legend Alexis Korner (Burrell later became the bassist of Bad Company). Fripp once again began looking for new members. The first to join was improvising percussionist Jamie Muir, whom Fripp had been considering as a possible member for some time. Next came vocalist and bassist John Wetton; formerly of the band Family and one of Fripp's college acquaintances. Wetton had been under consideration for the previous lineup of the band, but that proposition had fallen through. Now that King Crimson was starting over from scratch again, the opportunity was ripe.

Drummer Bill Bruford was next to sign up, choosing to leave the commercially successful Yes for the relatively unstable and unpredictable King Crimson. Bruford himself was more interested in artistic pursuits, and the framework of King Crimson appealed to that sensibility in him. Finally, violin, viola and keyboard player David Cross was selected to flesh out the sound of the new band. With Pete Sinfield gone, a new lyricist was needed. John Wetton recommended his old friend Richard Palmer-James, who got the job.

Rehearsals and touring began in late 1972, and Larks' Tongues in Aspic was released early the next year, and the group spent the remainder of 1973 touring Britain, Europe, and America.

This era of King Crimson demonstrated a kinship with the nascent heavy metal music then developing mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Fripp's guitar playing was loud and aggressive, and Bruford's propulsive drumming meshed with Wetton's often powerful bass guitar.

Muir left the group early in 1973, and during the lengthy tour that followed, the remaining members began assembling material for their next album, Starless and Bible Black. By early 1974, the album was finished. Most of the album was recorded from live performances in 1973, with only two full tracks (The Great Deceiver and Lament) and part of another track (The Night Watch) being studio productions, a fact that emphasises King Crimson's essentially live nature. Fripp never felt that recordings of any sort were adequate to capture the atmosphere and energy of a live performance. Another recording of live gigs, USA, was recorded soon afterwards but not released for another year.

David Cross's place in the group, meanwhile, was coming under pressure. His role as a violin-player had been more important in the earlier days of this version of Crimson, but as the music progressed — and got louder — he increasingly felt his contribution was unheard and sidelined: reduced, as he once said, to being just the electric piano player. He went, leaving the remaining trio to record Red.

Red included appearances by musicians from previous albums: Robin Miller on oboe, Marc Charig on cornet and former King Crimson member Mel Collins on soprano saxophone. Cross appeared on Providence, recorded in its namesake in Rhode Island. Ian McDonald also returned as a session musician on alto saxophone, with plans to rejoin as a full-time member. Fripp, increasingly distracted from Crimson by the writings of the mystic George Gurdjieff, even spoke of being replaced by McDonald. This was the second time in the band's history that Fripp considered leaving the group to continue without him.

The Red line-up never toured, however; two months before the album's release, Robert Fripp announced that King Crimson had ceased to exist. "King Crimson is completely over for ever and ever," he said. It seemed that King Crimson was to end in Red; instead, it was the end of an era.

1980s

Early in 1981, Fripp and Bruford began considering the formation of a new group, to be called Discipline. The two spent some time searching for a bassist, but had little success in recruiting one until Tony Levin stopped by. Levin was known for his session work with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Peter Gabriel and others, and would have been one of Fripp's first choices had he known Levin was available. King Crimson had its bassist, and also a new sound in the Chapman Stick, which Levin would use instead of bass guitar on all but one of the tracks on their forthcoming LP.

During this time, Fripp called up guitarist Adrian Belew, who was on tour with Talking Heads. Fripp had never worked with another guitarist in the same band, so the decision to seek a second guitarist was highly indicative of Fripp's desire to create a sound completely unlike King Crimson. Belew, for his part, was flattered. He would join immediately following his tour with Talking Heads.

During rehearsals and initial recorded sessions in 1981, Fripp began suspecting that this new band really was King Crimson, despite his decision to call it Discipline. The other members concurred, and so King Crimson was reborn. The group released a trilogy of albums: Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair. Belew was responsible for the vocals, as well as almost all of the lyrics on the three albums. Also, with Belew, King Crimson for the first time had a lyricist who was also a performing member of the band, discounting the VS3 synthesiser that Peter Sinfield used during Lizard.

This version of King Crimson bore some resemblance to new wave music, possibly as a result of Belew's tenure with Talking Heads, often considered progenitors of the genre. Fripp intended to create the sound of a "rock gamelan", with an interlocking rhythmic quality to the paired guitars that he found similar to Indonesian gamelan ensembles.[4]

After Three of a Perfect Pair, King Crimson disbanded for several years. Fripp entered into a series of legal wranglings with his management, and this occupied much of his time, but resulted in the development of Discipline Global Mobile, a company through which King Crimson and various side projects and archives have emerged.

1990s

In 1991, Fripp invited former Japan lead singer David Sylvian to front a new King Crimson lineup that would have also included Chapman Stick player and Guitar Craft alumnus Trey Gunn. Sylvian declined the offer, yet the three musicians composed and toured together in 1992. When the trio went into the studio to record, former Peter Gabriel drummer Jerry Marotta was brought into the fold. A 'Crimsonesque' CD, The First Day was the recorded and released in July 1993. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Fripp made the future King Crimson lineup known for the first time: Fripp, Belew, Levin, Gunn and Marotta. Fripp, Gunn and Marotta had already convened in early 1993 to throw some musical ideas around. The results of this gathering between the three were the seeds to future Crim tracks, Vrooom and One Time.

During the autumn of 1993, Sylvian and Fripp went on a tour to promote The First Day. Marotta had prior commitments as a session drummer, but was still expected to join the planned reunion of Crimson in January 1994 (as was written in the Sylvian / Fripp tour book that was printed in August of 1993). Former Mr Mister drummer Pat Mastelotto had auditioned for the spot vacated by Marotta and won the job, even beating original Crimson drummer Michael Giles. Sylvian/Fripp went on the road for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, Marotta made it known to Tony Levin that he was not going to take part in the reformation of Crimson after all, due to the lucrative session and production work that was coming his way. Levin and Belew lobbied Fripp to ask Bruford to return to his old band, but Fripp and Gunn already had the highly impressive Mastelotto in mind for the job. Eventually both drummers were brought in.

Fripp has said he "envisioned a double trio" back in the fall of 1992, but that is obviously not quite accurate when events are taken into account. The "double trio" formation of King Crimson was not a planned, but more of a compromise. Bruford was brought in to appease the two former members, as well as a majority of the band's audience. To many fans, it couldn't have been Crimson without Bruford, and when the inclusion of Marotta was first announced, there was significant derision toward the idea. The same treatment would most likely have been accorded to Mastelotto as well, had Bruford not been asked. Harsh words between Fripp and Bruford were often exchanged in print interviews throughout the late 1980s. Even though he and Fripp did not get along as well as they once had, Bruford was tacked on at the last minute. The compromise was made.

King Crimson reformed as a sextet in 1994. This "double trio" formation released a few CDs in the mid 1990s: VROOOM (1994), THRAK (1995), and THRaKaTTaK (1996). The new King Crimson sound was something of a mixture of Discipline-era complementary guitars with the heavy rock feel of 1974's Red. Staging and rehearsing the sextet was an expensive proposition, however: this, combined with the level of experimentation within the band, soon contributed to its collapse.

In the late 1990s, Discipline Global Mobile operated as a distinctly artist-friendly label, and featured not only the works of King Crimson, but also of many side projects. ProjeKcts One, Two, Three, and Four, each a splinter group (a "fraKctalisation", according to Fripp) of King Crimson, released various recordings, demonstrating the improvisational musical highwire act that the constituent musicians are able to produce.

In 1998, DGM created the King Crimson Collector's Club (KCCC), a subscription-based service that released a live recording (originating from soundboard or bootleg recordings) every two months. Most of these live recordings are now available to buy at their website.

File:Kc-ticket.jpg
A ticket for a 2003 King Crimson live act in Russia

2000s

After the initial ProjeKcts' task was completed, Fripp outlined several possible futures for King Crimson. One of the ideas presented was ProjeKct Zero, a ProjeKct unit that would feature all six King Crimson members. Bruford was not interested and quit the band to focus on jazz, and Levin let his active involvement in King Crimson rest until further notice; this left Belew, Fripp, Gunn, and Mastelotto as the next line-up. Their first studio effort was The ConstruKction of Light (2000), accompanied by another album, Heaven and Earth, which was released under the name ProjeKct X. Heaven and Earth was edited together by Mastelotto from material recorded during the rehearsal and recording period of the studio album.

After the economic reversals of 2000 and 2001, DGM ceased acting as a general label and artist's blog site and refocused its energy on King Crimson. A lengthy The ConstruKction of Light tour was followed by another tour opening for the band Tool and the Level Five tour that served to write, rehearse, and evolve new pieces for the next album. In 2003, the album The Power to Believe was released and the band toured in support of it.

In late November 2003, Trey Gunn announced his departure from the band. Both Robert Fripp and Tony Levin reported that Levin will become active bassist of King Crimson again. The current line-up thus is Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp, Tony Levin and Pat Mastelotto. A 2005 interview with Belew revealed that the band was on a brief hiatus, and planned to return to studio work in September 2007, but Fripp and Belew met and collaborated on some new material at StudioBelew in February 2006. Fripp has recently referred to this collaboration to as ProjeKct Six.

Music

Fripp, as noted, has described King Crimson as "a way of doing things", and also as "an experiment in organizing anarchy". Over a period of 35 years, and many changes in membership, configuration, and instrumentation, King Crimson has maintained a kind of constancy in its musical vision rare among long-lived bands.

Influences

The music of King Crimson was obviously grounded to some extent in the rock of the 1960s, and especially the acid rock and psychedelic music movements. The first King Crimson frequently played Donovan's "Get Thy Bearings", and were known to play The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" in their rehearsals.

However, where bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones played more sophisticated forms of American rock, Crimson attempted to "Europeanise" what had previously been an essentially American form of music. To a great extent, they stripped away the blues-based foundation of rock music and replaced it with a foundation based in the modern European symphonic tradition. Though they cast a wide net, two names in particular seem to have had a powerful influence on Crimson's music.

Gustav Holst is the more obvious of the two on the surface. The first incarnation of King Crimson played the Mars section of Holst's suite The Planets as a regular part of their live set. The influence of Béla Bartók is more subtle, but has been referred to many times by Fripp and other band members, and seems more pervasively present in the band's overall musical repertoire. As a result of this influence, their first album is frequently viewed as the nominal starting point of the symphonic rock or progressive rock movements.

Robert Fripp's solo work and King Crimson's music from 1981 onwards show a definite influence of Gamelan music as well as late 20th Century classical composers such as Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley.

Musical themes

Fans have two antithetical complaints about each new album or incarnation of the band: either they say that it's nothing like the King Crimson they know and love, or they say that it's exactly like what has gone before and nothing new has been added. The apparent contradiction can be resolved by understanding that, while the group constantly creates new sounds and new pieces, several themes have remained constant from the earliest versions of the band to the present.

The most obvious of these themes is composition by the use of a gradually building rhythmic motif. The Holst Mars that the first King Crimson played is a clear example of this, with its complex pulse in 5/8 time over which strings and winds—or, as played by King Crimson, mellotron—play a skirling melody above. This piece evolved into "The Devil's Triangle" on the In the Wake of Poseidon album, and was followed by many other forms, from "The Talking Drum" in 1973, "Industry" in 1984 all the way to "Dangerous Curves" in 2003.

A second recurring theme is an instrumental piece, often embedded as a break in a song, in which the band plays a passage of considerable rhythmic complexity. King Crimson's single best-known song, "21st Century Schizoid Man", is an early example of this. Their series of pieces collectively titled Larks' Tongues in Aspic (as well as pieces of similar intent, such as "Thrak" and "Level Five") go deeper into polyrhythmic complexity, delving into rhythms that wander into and out of general synchronisation with each other—to the point where the listener is frequently unable to even count the main measure beats—yet through polyrhythmic synchronisation all 'finish' together. (These pieces occasionally fail onstage, instances of which Fripp refers to as "train wrecks" or "clams crimsonique".) Perhaps the pinnacle of rhythmic complexity in the band's repertoire was the trilogy of early 1980s albums, which contained gamelan-like rhythmic layers and continual staccato patterns overlaying each other (a case in point being "Neal And Jack And Me" from Beat).

Other themes harder to document clearly include the composition of difficult passages for individual instruments (especially Fripp's guitar—notably "Fracture" on Starless and Bible Black); pieces with a loud, aggressive sound not unlike heavy metal music; and the juxtaposition of ornate tunes and ballads with unusual, often dissonant noises.

Improvisation

From the beginning, King Crimson performances featured improvisations, in which the music can, and frequently does, go anywhere. Improvisations can be imbedded in composed pieces, like 21st Century Schizoid Man or Thrak, but most Crimson performances over the years have included at least one stand-alone improvisation, where the band simply started playing and took the music wherever it went, sometimes including passages of improvised silence (as Bill Bruford's contribution to the improvised Trio). The earliest example of an unambiguously improvising King Crimson on record is the spacious, oft-criticised (as self indulgent) extended middle-section of Moonchild from the first album, in which the composed parts act as bookends to the improv.

Unlike most jazz and rock improvisation or jamming, these sessions are rarely in any sense blues-based. They vary so much in sound that King Crimson has been able to release several albums consisting entirely of improvised music. Occasionally, particular improvised pieces will be performed in different forms at different shows, becoming more and more refined and eventually appearing on official studio releases (the most recent example being Power to Believe III, which originally existed as the stage improv Deception of the Thrush, a piece played onstage for more than six years before appearing on record).

Band members

Current lineup

Former members

Additional and guest musicians

Discography

Main article: King Crimson discography

King Crimson has released 14 studio albums, 17 Live albums, 16 Singles and EPs, 29 Collectors compilations, 7 Other compilations, and 6 videos

Studio Albums

Bibliography

  • King Crimson official website, (currently redirects to DGM Live)
  • DGM Live, Robert Fripp's music label with controlling rights to the King Crimson catalog, providing access to an online shop and downloads
  • Robert Fripp's diary, an online diary of Robert Fripp, the sole musician to have been a member of every line-up of King Crimson
  • Elephant Talk, the original enthusiast resource and discussion site for King Crimson and Robert Fripp fans
  • Krimson News, a site for news, resources, discussion about King Crimson and related artists as well as a podcast recapping the latest headlines and news.
  • ProjeKction, a site for news, resources and the discussion of King Crimson and alumni
  • Indoor Games, main Russian King Crimson fan site - full official Russian / English discography and original as well as translated lyrics from ever recorded compositions...
  • King Crimson Live, containing information about King Crimson and related live performances and recordings
  • 21st Century Schizoid Band, a group made up principally of musicians who were members of King Crimson between 1969 and 1972
  • Template:Last.fm
  • King Crimson discography at MusicBrainz
  • King Crimson - O Rei Escarlate, Brazilian King Crimson site with the history of the band, discography, images, texts, links, complete videos of shows to attend online, forum, discussion lists, lyrics of all albums translated into portuguese and much more.

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