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Posts tagged ‘Robert Fripp’

Dec 13

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In the court of Robert Fripp

The basement of the Palace Café in the Fulham Palace Road was where the first version of King Crimson got it together, as we used to say, and where Robert Fripp auditioned and rehearsed the subsequent editions of the band. One Sunday in late August 1970 Fripp invited me to meet him there. He knew that I’d been a drummer, but also that I hadn’t held a pair of sticks for several years. “Come and have a play,” he said. There was a kit set up in the basement, along with an array of amps and keyboards. And so for an hour or so we just played, improvising freely, Fripp on electric piano as well as guitar. We’d had a number of interesting conversations about music during the preceding months but I don’t remember any advance discussion about what we were going to do that day. We just played. At the end he took a reel of tape off the Revox, put it in a carton and handed it to me. I’ve still got it, although I’ve never listened to it. I really don’t want to know whether I’d get a pleasant surprise or, more probably, a dose of humiliating reality. We never spoke about it, and I never got behind a kit again. But Fripp is not a man who often does things without forethought, and all I can imagine is that he wanted to see how it felt to play freely without having to measure himself against someone who really knew what they were doing.

I thought about that day for the first time in years when the percussionist Jamie Muir turned up as one of the interviewees in Toby Amies’s In the Court of the Crimson King, a film portrait of the band, seen through its present incarnation and the views of some of its former members. Muir joined King Crimson a couple of years after my little session with Fripp, becoming the fifth member of the line-up that included David Cross on violin and keyboards, John Wetton on bass guitar and vocals, and Bill Bruford on drums. Muir was added as a kind of wild card. I’d seen him and interviewed him when he was in a band called Boris, in which he played a strange variety of percussion devices and did things like burst blood capsules in his mouth. Later he was with Derek Bailey and Evan Parker in the Music Improvisation Company. Highly skilled, and capable of playing perfectly conventionally, at this time he was a kind of performance artist whose presence in King Crimson was intended to shake his colleagues out of their strait-laced musicianly habits. He and Bruford got on surprisingly well; according to Muir, it was Fripp who, having invited him into the band, eventually tired of an approach that clearly failed to match his (Fripp’s) own love of order and preparation. He was invited him to leave after less than a year, having played on Lark’s Tongues in Aspic. He went off to a Buddhist monastery and is now a painter.

Originally intended to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the band in 1969, Amies’s film — first screened in cinemas and now available as a DVD — is on the one hand a kind of real-life Spinal Tap and on the other an acute portrayal of Fripp’s effect on the musicians with whom he has worked. Quite early on, Fripp tells Amies that he was “heartbroken” when the drummer Mike Giles and the saxophonist Ian McDonald became the first musicians to defect from the band, only months after their appearance on the bill of the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park, the release of their debut album and a US tour had made them the sensation of the year.

“He’s always been good at recruiting people — he knows he can’t do it on his own,” Giles says, the implicit suggestion being that doing it on his own would be the preferred option, were it possible. But here’s what Fripp now recalls of the rupture in December 1969: “I offered to leave King Crimson if Ian and Mike would continue. It was more important to me that the band continued than that I continued with the band.”

Of the original gang, we also hear from McDonald, interviewed before his death earlier this year, and Pete Sinfield, their lyricist. Adrian Belew, a vital foil for Fripp in the various editions of the band between 1981 and 2013, is clearly puzzled over why they’re not still working together, and says of their partnership: “I don’t know where you’d ever get this again. Robert has a way of creating a situation in which music is going to occur that you couldn’t otherwise do.” Others are more ambivalent. Trey Gunn, a guitarist with King Crimson from 1994 to 2003, describes being in the band as “a little bit like having a low-grade infection — you’re not really sick, but you don’t feel well, either.” Jakko Jakszyk, the guitarist and singer who came into the line-up in 2010 after several years in a tribute band which featured almost all of the original line-up, sums up what many members must have felt: “You’re irreplaceable. Just like the next bloke.”

All this sounds very unsympathetic. But Bruford, with the perspective of a man who retired from playing in 2009 to study for a PhD, has a perceptive take: “Change is part of what the whole band is about. Change is essential. Otherwise you turn into the Moody Blues, for heaven’s sake.”

Fripp is given his say (and endorsed the final edit of the film), and the impression he leaves is of a complex, thoughtful and unyielding man who has found his own way through life, music, and the music business. Not mentioned here is his long struggle to obtain justice from those who formerly held the rights to the fruits of his labour, resulting in his freedom on recent years to release fastidiously compiled and remastered box sets of the band’s early output (a 26-disc summary of their complete recordings from 1969, for instance). But he does talk briefly about his discovery in the 1970s of the teachings of J. G. Bennett, a follower of Sufism and G. I. Gurdjieff, and his involvement in the Society for Continuous Education, which further Bennett’s work. The gleanings can be found in a hefty new book, The Guitar Circle, a 560-page hardback full of aphorisms and Zen riddles in which Fripp draws from almost four decades of work with his own League of Crafty Guitarists to produce a kind of operating manual for art and life, a typical aspect of which is perhaps best summed up in something he says during the film: “If you have an unpleasant nature and dislike people, that is no barrier to work.” His sense of humour — to which the term wry does not do justice — can be glimpsed here.

Throughout the film, the present band — three drummers, two guitarists, keyboards, returnee Mel Collins on saxophones and flute and long-standing bassist Tony Levin — is heard in concert and rehearsal often enough to give a clear idea of what they do nowadays with the familiar Crimson repertoire, revelling in negotiating its knotty contours and in their own exploitation of the available hardware and technology, to the delight of their legion of loyal fans. The extras in the box set of the film include footage of a rehearsal take of “Sailor’s Tale”, a song from the 1971 album Islands, containing a particularly brilliant version of the guitar solo in which Fripp breaks free of his familiar approach and produces a piece of music of staggering audacity and eternal value, a visionary moment and a justification in itself for King Crimson’s long and often tortuous existence.

* The film In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 is available as a two-disc Blu-Ray/DVD set or as an eight-disc box set including six audio CDs: http://www.dgmlive.com. Robert Fripp’s The Guitar Circle is published by Panegyric/DGM: http://www.guitarcraft.com

Oct 10

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The spirit of 1971

On an earlier re-release of the first and only album by Centipede, the 50-strong (and therefore 100-footed) band assembled by Keith Tippett, RCA’s marketing department used a quote from the Melody Maker‘s original review: “No one who wants a permanent record of where our music was at in 1971 will want to be without Septober Energy.” It was true at the time and today, listening to a remastered and reissued version of the double album made by an ensemble containing actual and former members of Soft Machine, King Crimson, the Blue Notes, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, the Blossom Toes, Nucleus, Patto, the Steam Packet and Dantalian’s Chariot, it still feels right.

In his notes to the new Septober Energy reissue, Sid Smith quotes my description of it at the time as “a miracle”, but as miracles go it was an eminently achievable one, given the spirit of creativity, goodwill and mutual encouragement in which it was conceived and implemented under Tippett’s inspired guidance. This was the first of his large-ensemble projects; if it lacked some of the finesse of later endeavours, it wanted for nothing in terms of spirit.

The clue was in the title. “Energy” was a word much applied back then to the kind of improvising habitually done by the freer players here — the tenorists Gary Windo and Alan Skidmore and the trombonist Paul Rutherford, for example, the singers Julie Tippetts and Maggie Nichols, and the three marvellous South Africans: the trumpeter Mongezi Feza, the altoist Dudu Pukwana and the bassist Harry Miller. But others from related fields were cheerfully infected by the same vibe: the trumpeter Ian Carr, the guitarist Brian Godding, the oboeist Karl Jenkins and the 19 string players led by the violinist Wilf Gibson. And then there were the horns from Tippett’s own sextet, already borrowed by Soft Machine and King Crimson: the cornetist Mark Charig, the trombonist Nick Evans and the altoist Elton Dean. There were five bass players in all, including Jeff Clyne and Roy Babbington, and three drummers, two of them being Robert Wyatt and John Marshall. Robert Fripp played guitar on stage and produced the album.

I seem to remember that the announcement of their debut concert, at the Lyceum in November 1970, made the front page of the MM. After that first gig, boisterously exhilarating but inevitably chaotic, they went on the road in Europe and had a great time. The following June they went into Wessex Studios in north London, located in an old church hall, with just four days for recording the 80-minute piece under Fripp’s supervision and a couple more days for him to mix and edit the results into four movements, each one fitting a side of the double album. Their last appearance was at the Albert Hall in December 1971.

All the enthusiasm of the time, as yet unspoiled by time and the depredations of the music industry, is there on the album. And so, thanks to the skills of the composer and the producer, is a clear view of the individual strengths of the featured soloists (meaning practically everybody), as well as their readiness to attempt a coalescence into something greater than the sum of the parts.

Part 1 begins with the sound of small percussion, like something from a Shinto temple, before long tones — strings, voices — emerge and hover, soon disrupted by the first hints of the storms to come. Gradually the brilliant disposition of the orchestral resources comes into focus as Tippett balances the roistering horns and thunderous drums with subtler deployments and great control of crescendo and diminuendo. The wrapover to Part 2 is a lovely bass conversation — one bowed, one plucked, one playing harmonics con legno — leading to a very period-correct jazz-rock sequence with Tony Fennell’s drums and Babbington’s bass guitar accompanying quarrelsome saxes over a brass choir, suddenly interrupted by giant overlapping unison riffs in which, metaphorically, the entire band seems to have been fed through a fuzz-box. A space is cleared for Carr’s serene trumpet and Skidmore’s urgent tenor to take solos against the rhythm section, both exploiting the lift of lyrical chord sequence, before Godding’s distortions announce the return of the heavy artillery. An improvised trombone quartet adds another contrasting texture.

Part 3 opens with the four singers — Tippetts, Nichols, Zoot Money, Mike Patto — delivering Julie’s lyric without accompaniment: “Unite for every nation / Unite for all the land / Unite for liberation / Unite for the freedom of man.” Then the trio of drummers take over for a powerful conversation, each individual carefully separated in the stereo picture, leading into a long ensemble passage that builds to a shuddering climax before a slow electronic fade leads to the two female singers improvising over the strings, like a giant version of the SME, the same forces combining in a disquieting written section that ends the side. Tippett’s solo piano announces Part 4, sliding into a broad, swelling theme for brass, mutating through a long Elton Dean soprano solo into a trenchant restatement of the “Unite for…” song, and ending with a pensive coda for piano and cornet.

Of course it sprawls, and not every note played over the course of almost an hour and a half could be described as deathless or essential. But it was and remains a triumph of conception and execution, a vision of musical scale with, as it were, the Little Theatre Club at one end and Woodstock at the other. It also set me thinking about the form an equivalent project might take today, with similarly open-minded and collaboratively inclined musicians drawn from newer generations. Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke from Radiohead would have to be there. Shirley Tetteh, Shabaka Hutchings, Olie Brice, Sheila Maurice Grey, Moses Boyd, Nubaya Garcia, Rachel Musson, Tom Skinner, Rosie Turton, Cassie Kinoshi and Theon Cross from the new London jazz scene. Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley from Portishead. Keiran Hebden (Four Tet) and Sam Shepherd (Floating Points). Well, you can make your own list.

* The CD reissue of Centipede’s Septober Energy is on the Esoteric label. I don’t know who took the photograph at the Lyceum show.

Dec 9

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Loud and quiet moments

The car, I find, is a good place to listen to music. Mine is old enough to have a CD player, and I hear lots of new stuff in what is a very satisfactory sound box. But a funny thing happened when I put on the new King Crimson album, a two-CD “official bootleg” of their return to touring in the US between July and September this year. As I drove along, listening to the music, there were noises that made me think something had happened to the car: maybe a piston had blown, or the rear suspension had collapsed.

Wrong. It was the clattering set up by the three drummers who currently make up almost half of the current King Crimson, and whose synchronous but sometimes fairly abstruse playing occasionally gives the impression of a complex machine making its own decisions.

Robert Fripp has form with this sort of thing. Mike Giles, his band’s original drummer, could make 4/4 sound like a study of the calculus of infinitesimals. Later on, the short-lived combination of Jamie Muir and Bill Bruford created a provocative blend of the obsessively precise and the utterly random. Nowadays, when King Crimson take the stage, it is with the three drummers — Pat Mastelotto, Jeremy Stacey and Gavin Harrison — arrayed in front of the other four musicians.

The saxophonist/flautist Mel Collins, the guitarist Jakko Jakszyk, the bassist Tony Levin, and Fripp himself (seated, as always) take up their positions behind the battery of batterie. I don’t know why Fripp chose this configuration, but the music — recorded at two venues, the Anthem in Washington, DC and the Egg in Albany, NY — begins, after a short spoken introduction by the leader, with a thunderous percussion-only barrage that made me think of a 21st century Sandy Nelson, rendered in Warhol-style triplicate.

The rest of the two hours is devoted to King Crimson old and new, from “21st Century Schizoid Man”, “Epitaph” and “Islands” through “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic”, “Starless” “Red” and “Discipline” to a few examples of their more recent work, with which I am considerably less familiar. The respect shown to the greatest hits is absolute; the material is performed with technical excellence and fidelity to the originals but also a spirit that makes the clambering, juddering lines of something like “Level Five” — from 2003’s The Power to Believe — into more than mere exercises, while the rendering of “Starless” has a beguilingly eccentric grandeur that doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. Jakszyk’s vocals recall those of Greg Lake and John Wetton, the washes of mellotron strings and flutes add an authentic period flavour, and Collins pops up occasionally to remind us what an exceptional and unjustly underappreciated player he has always been.

Arriving in the same package was something very different: a box of eight CDs called Music for Quiet Moments, a compilation of the solo pieces Fripp recorded between 2004 and 2009 in many different venues around Europe and America and released individually as downloads between May 2020 and April 2021. This music proceeds from the experiments that began in the autumn on 1972, when Brian Eno invited me to his flat in Maida Vale to hear something he’d been up to, using two Revox tape machines to record and loop Fripp’s guitar, creating a slow-moving, unusually textured, quietly mesmerising sound that could function as foreground or background. Released the following year under the title (No Pussyfooting) on Island’s low-price HELP label, it was the beginning not just of Frippertronics and Fripp’s more recent Soundscapes but of Eno’s work with ambient and generative music.

These new Soundscapes range in length from a handful of minutes to three-quarters of an hour. Some of the pieces share titles that include “Elegy”, “Pastorale”, “Seascape” and “Evensong”, indicating the moods Fripp is painting with his guitar and its associated effects, often producing sounds resembling slow-moving clusters of violas and cellos. Miraculously, at least to my ears, the risk of passivity is avoided. Some tracks, like “Strong Quiet I and II” from Brussels in 2009, feature an improvised solo guitar line over the drifting clouds of sound: recognisably Fripp, completely lacking in ego-play, always worth following where they lead.

Is this background and/or foreground and/or something in between? Music for listening, or to accompany other activities, or to create a sense of nothingness? From Atlanta in 2006 come pieces titled “Affirmation” and “Aspiration”, a reminder of the names John Coltrane gave to the individual movements of A Love Supreme. And in interviews (such as the one in the December issue of Uncut magazine) Fripp is unafraid to use terms such as “devotional”, “sacred” and “meditative” to describe what’s going on. He isn’t more specific. But the music there to be used, in whatever way you feel appropriate.

* King Crimson’s Music Is Our Friend / Live in Washington and Albany 2021 and Robert Fripp’s Music for Quiet Moments are released on the Panegyric label (www.dgmlive.com). The photograph of Fripp was taken by Tony Levin in Chicago this year.

Aug 24

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David Enthoven: the last goodbye

EG King's RoadOn my way to David Enthoven’s funeral this morning, I walked from Sloane Square down the King’s Road and paused at No 63A, where it all began. The weather was glorious: in the perfect sunshine, it was easy to drift back to the Chelsea of an imagined and sometimes real ’60s.

David died in London last week, aged 72, five days after being diagnosed with kidney cancer. Behind that door and up a flight of stairs, he and Johnny Gaydon, his schoolfriend and first business partner, set up EG Management in 1969, with King Crimson as their first clients. Marc Bolan, ELP and Roxy Music soon joined the roster. They were great days. (And here’s the obituary I wrote for the Guardian.)

When I got to St Luke’s, a large 19th century Anglican church just off the King’s Road, it was already close to packed with people wanting to say farewell to an extraordinary man. As they lingered in the sunlit churchyard after the ceremony, the event had something of the qualities of an English garden party, which was just as it should have been.

Tim Clark, his friend and partner in IE:Music, his second management company, gave an address which stressed the life-enhancing qualities that made David special to every single member of the congregation. Robbie Williams, whose life and career David and Tim had salvaged and remade, sang “Moon River” — a lovely choice — accompanied by the acoustic guitar of Guy Chambers. Lucy Pullin and a choir sang “Angels”, which Williams and Chambers wrote after David and Tim had brought them together. Lamar led the singing of “Jerusalem”.

The congregation included Robert Fripp, the founder of King Crimson, and all five surviving members of Roxy Music from the sessions for the band’s debut album in the summer of 1972: Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera and Paul Thompson, who came down for the funeral from Newcastle, where he now plays the drums with Lindisfarne.

One of the morning’s pleasures, over which the man in whose memory we were gathered would certainly have shared a chuckle, was the sight of Fripp, Eno and Ferry (so much history there, from Ferry’s failed audition for King Crimson to Fripp and Eno’s collaboration on No Pussyfooting and beyond) joining the singing of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. You don’t get that every day.