-->The King is dead. Long live the King.
When the king in question is progressive rock legends King
Crimson, this is not news. Practically alone among all contemporary music
ensembles, King Crimson has made a habit of being active for a few years before
splitting up, then reforming a few years later – typically with a radically
different lineup and sonic palette. Just last week, leader, guitarist, and lone
mainstay Robert Fripp announced that the group, moribund since 2008, would be
“returning to active service” as of September 2014.
Predictably, the lineup (Crimson’s eighth since 1969) is new
and highly unorthodox. The group’s foundation comprises no fewer than three
drummers: previous members Gavin Harrison (on loan from latter-day proggers
Porcupine Tree) and Pat Mastelotto, and Bill Reiflin (REM). On-again, off-again
member Tony Levin (bass and Chapman Stick) is on again. Saxophonist Mel
Collins, who last played with Crimson in 1974, returns, while newcomer Jakko
Jakszyk (who played in a Crimson cover band as well as a trio with Fripp and
Collins) joins Fripp on guitar duties.
As notable as who is in the band is who is not. Guitarist
Adrian Belew, who endured through three lineup changes over the past three
decades, was not asked to participate. On his Facebook page, Belew noted, “Robert informed me in an
email that he was starting a 7-piece version of the band. He said I would not
be right for what the band is doing.” Drummer Bill Bruford, widely considered
to be Crimson’s (and the progressive rock genre’s) all-time best drummer,
retired in 2009 after penning his autobiography, which details the increasingly
prickly relationship he had with Fripp at the end of their 20-year association.
Fripp
has often said that studio recordings are like love letters while live
performances are hot dates. In a break from group history, the new incarnation
of Crimson has no plans for making a studio recording (the last Crimson album
of new material was released in 2003) and instead is compiling a concert tour
focusing on the U.S., during which the band will perform new renditions of
classic material.
Though
the active-inactive-reactive pattern has long been established, Fripp’s news
has shocked the progressive rock community, largely because Fripp himself
announced his own retirement from performance in an interview with The
Financial Times in August 2012. The original King Crimson went through three
lineups from 1969-1974 before Fripp announced that the band had “ceased to
exist.” It did not reappear until 1981, when Fripp and Bruford reformed with
Americans Belew and Levin. That lineup made three albums in three years and
broke up in 1985, only to reform in 1994 as a “double trio” with two guitarists
(Fripp and Belew), two Stick players (Levin and Trey Gunn), and two drummers
(Bruford and Mastelotto).
Today,
with an eighth lineup after four hiatuses, King Crimson is again, in Fripp’s
words in “Go! mode”. About the only conclusions one can draw from this is that
there is likely in the future to be yet another hiatus with perhaps yet another
lineup – that, and the fact that whatever music this new King Crimson makes, it
will be highly adventurous, unusual, and heavy. In every incarnation, the band
has been a musical pioneer, whether with the Mellotron in the late 60s and
early 70s, group improvisation of the highest order in the mid-70s, intricate
electronic interplay in the 80s, and bombastic noise in the 90s and 00s. In an
era when old bands routinely reform for money rather than from inspiration, it
is refreshing that a consistently noncommercial group like King Crimson feels
it still has useful work to do.
Apparently
Mel Brooks was right. It is good to be the King.
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