Ask anybody who noticed King Crimson’s 27-date tour of the UK in November and December 1972 what they recall of the present there’s a superb probability that the title of 1 individual will probably be uppermost of their reminiscences: Jamie Muir.
The loss of life of the 82-year previous musician and artist sparked quite a few tributes and a wave of appreciation not only for his work as a member of the now-legendary Larks’ Tongues-era quintet but additionally for his pioneering contribution to the UK’s free jazz scene of the late Sixties and early Seventies the place he labored as a part of The Music Improvisation Firm alongside luminaries such saxophonist Evan Parker and guitarist Derek Bailey.
Though Muir was solely a member of King Crimson for a couple of months he was a massively influential determine, not solely throughout his tenure on stage and within the making of the Larks’ Tongues In Aspic album, but additionally left a legacy would resonate by way of successive line-ups due to his coining of the phrase ‘larks’ tongues in aspic’ when he was as soon as requested to explain that quintet’s music.
Born in 1942 after initially taking to the stage as a trombonist after being expelled from artwork college in Edinburgh in 1966, he would finally turn into a drummer. Having based a gaggle known as The Assassination Weapon by which he additionally managed the band’s psychedelic mild present, his purpose shifted from Edinburgh to London the place he rapidly grew to become embedded within the improvisation scene whereas funding himself with a day job as a salesman in Bentalls Division Retailer. Muir, who was additionally briefly a member of Pete Brown’s Battered Ornaments, noticed King Crimson acting at Hyde Park in 1969 when the unique group supported The Rolling Stones. Impressed by the pressure of Crimson’s set, many years later he informed me within the first of many interviews, “Most bands come alongside after which develop however Crimson simply got here on and exploded with this very grownup, clever, cutting-edge music. It was simply this entire bundle that went wallop!”
Muir additionally performed with Sunship, a jazz-rock outfit that included ex-Mushy Machine sideman saxophonist Lyn Dobson, Allan Holdsworth, and future Gilgamesh/Nationwide Well being keyboard participant Alan Gowen, with whom Muir had additionally performed within the Afro-rock combo Assegai in 1971. The opposite notable band Muir was a part of was Boris. Championed by Melody Maker’s Richard Williams, Boris blended rock, jazz, free-improv, and theatrical presentation led by Muir himself. Williams, who really useful Muir to Robert Fripp in the summertime of 1972, remembers, “Jamie was such an attention-grabbing man. He was a humorous mixture of depth and craziness. There was a looning aspect to him clearly. That Dadaist factor was attention-grabbing. He was clearly very critical however critical in a method that the majority musicians wouldn’t have understood, which is why Robert, even together with his meticulous viewpoint, did reply to him.”
Simply three years after witnessing King Crimson Muir discovered himself jamming with Robert Fripp to turn into the primary recruitment to the brand new incarnation of King Crimson. Jamie recalled the event. “Fripp got here spherical and we performed for a few hours, upstairs in my little rehearsal room with mattresses plugged up towards the home windows. All I keep in mind was enjoying some actually quick and livid blowouts, which from a drummer’s perspective was the Tony Williams/Billy Cobham sort of factor. It was pretty energetic stuff and I believe we loved ourselves. My feeling about getting the decision was: ‘Terrific.’ King Crimson was the perfect for me as a result of it was a rock band that had greater than three mind cells. I used to be very rather more an instrumental model of musician reasonably than being song-based and there weren’t many different bands that I might have been any good in. I used to be extraordinarily happy and I felt utterly at residence with Crimson.”
Just a little older than everybody else, he was fast to steer with options for concepts or approaches to the fabric and musical vocabulary they have been making an attempt to develop. Such was the sense of journey and open-mindedness in these formative days no one within the group baulked at or questioned the percussionist’s arsenal of pistachio shells, baggage of dried leaves, home baking trays, tuned plastic bleach bottles, previous suitcases, rolled-up newspapers, a big noticed, duck calls, toys, and an aerophone – a brass mouthpiece affixed to a size of rubber hose which when whirled above the top produced a pitch with a doppler impact – along with a extra standard drum equipment, cymbals and gongs.
Located close to the centre of the stage, Muir supplied a visible focus for a lot of in these audiences. Wearing a break up fur jacket that had as soon as belonged to a girlfriend, he resembled one thing akin to a shaman wearing animal skins as he moved quickly round his array of percussion and toys. Within the climatic sections of the music, he would work himself right into a frenzy, transferring with an anarchic abandon as if possessed, flailing his equipment and close by tools flight instances with chains whereas showing to be spitting blood from his mouth. Though these have been theatrical capsules secreted in his mouth, the visible impact was startling. If the punters regarded him as one thing of an eccentric performer, then spare a thought for his fellow musicians on stage who had no inkling as to what Muir would do when he joined them on stage.
Most of the sounds and concepts Muir got here up with have been adopted and accommodated irrespective of how unorthodox they seemed to be. Throughout the making of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Muir recommended the thrill of overlapping voices heard on the coda of LTIA Half I, the otherworldly and tape-manipulated sounds that grace the opening of Exiles and naturally, recording the sound of fingers sloshing round in buckets of mud throughout the introduction of Simple Cash. Whereas many of those sounds have been fleeting and ephemeral of their nature and deployment, that didn’t forestall them from changing into etched into Crimson’s future musical vocabulary. The surprising screeching marking the transition between the climax of The Speaking Drum and the grating intro of LTIA Pt II was produced by the band members blowing as arduous as they may into the reeds of classic bicycle horns. Lots of these sounds left an indelible drummer Pat Mastelotto, whose behavior of triggering digital samples of Muir’s work had the impact of summoning that mercurial spirit into the Twenty first-century physique of King Crimson.
Prompted by a profound non secular awakening, Muir give up Crimson, music, and London, after the recording of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic in February 1973. Nonetheless, earlier than driving north he paused lengthy sufficient to inform Sure’s Jon Anderson about Paramhansa Yogananda’s ebook, Autobiography Of A Yogi and thereby inadvertently impressed the conceptual framing for Sure’s Tales From Topographic Oceans. Thereafter Muir joined the Samye Ling Monastery close to Eskdalemuir in southern Scotland to pursue a monastic Buddhist life, additionally attended by artist Fergus Corridor who would offer the duvet artwork for The Younger Individuals’ Information To King Crimson and The Compact King Crimson. Upon returning to secular life within the early Nineteen Eighties Muir as soon as once more grew to become a part of the improvised music scene and likewise took to portray giant surrealist work. Not many of those have survived due to Jamie’s behavior of burning these canvases he now not appreciated. Fortunately, a much less pyrotechnically inclined technique of deleting unsatisfactory work offered itself after he started creating digital artwork within the early 2000s.
Though I solely noticed Jamie as soon as in December 1972 with King Crimson, the reminiscence of his incandescent presence by no means left me. I am doubly fortunate to have talked to him a number of occasions in subsequent years about that interval of his life. Not solely was he an inspiring, catalysing pressure of nature, he was additionally a stunning, modest soul. An extended-time resident of Somerset, though he’d clearly moved on together with his life, each time I talked to him Jamie retained an excellent fondness for what was achieved throughout King Crimson. “The essence of it was that we have been 5 musicians carrying with them their qualities and items and nonetheless looking for a method of welding all of it collectively into one distinct persona.”
