Jazz Articles about Robert Fripp

About Robert Fripp

Album Review

For a band that reinvents itself every decade or so, King Crimson has always treated New York as something closer to a proving ground than a tour stop. The city runs through the group's history, from the 1969 Fillmore East debut through the Larks' era sendoff at Central Park in 1974, six nights at the Savoy in 1981, later singled out as a high point, and a 2008 stand at the Nokia Theatre that marked drummer Gavin Harrison's arrival in ...

Extended Analysis

Exposures

by John Kelman
June 4, 2022

Between the impact of the COVID pandemic since 2020, and in the eight year-long tenure of King Crimson's final lineup, which toured between 2014 and 2021, there's been a lot revealed about its sole remaining founding member, guitarist/keyboardist Robert Fripp. Since 2012, the more than five-decade history of King Crimson, live and in the studio, has been painstakingly and exhaustively documented in a series of large multimedia box sets and smaller, more price-friendly editions of key material, often ...

Album Review

King Crimson: Music is Our Friend: Live In Washington and Albany, 2021

Read "Music is Our Friend: Live In Washington and Albany, 2021" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
November 12, 2021

You probably know the old adage about assumptions. After seeing the current (slightly fluid) King Crimson lineup twice every time the perennially groundbreaking group made it to North American shores since 2014, with no Canadian dates available in 2021 and the COVID Delta variant running rampant across the United States, the decision was made to forego traveling south to the USA to catch the band. After all, with the band touring, for the first time, on double bills with the ...

Album Review

King Crimson: The Complete 1969 Recordings

Read "The Complete 1969 Recordings" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
October 31, 2020

There will, inevitably, exist some cynics who will dispute the first comment about King Crimson's long-awaited The Complete 1969 Recordings box set, but it's difficult to imagine it being anything but the plain truth. This is, indeed, the definitive final word on the band's first lineup, collecting multiple versions of its earth-shattering 1969 Island Records debut, In the Court of the Crimson King: An Observation by King Crimson (from this point on, attributed to its current label, Panegyric), alongside sonically ...

Album Review

Jakko M. Jakszyk: Secrets & Lies

Read "Secrets & Lies" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
October 20, 2020

Life often unfolds in unexpected ways. For some, like Jakko M. Jakszyk, it has taken some truly surprising twists and turns. That the 62 year-old multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter has attained considerably greater visibility in the last ten years than in the previous 35 has, to say the least, righted a significant wrong. Which makes the release of Secrets & Lies, Jakszk's first solo album since the The Bruised Romantic Glee Club (Iceni, 2006) and its 2009, self-released companion piece, ...

Extended Analysis

Heaven & Earth: Live and in the Studio 1997-2008

by John Kelman
June 8, 2019

Yet another year, yet another characteristically detailed and chronologically contextualized King Crimson mega-box set. Except that 2019 is no typical year. And Heaven & Earth is no typical King Crimson box set. While Heaven & Earth: Live and in the Studio 1997-2008 completes (well, almost) the series of box sets documenting King Crimson's original commercial recordings (and so much more), it's far from the group's first (or only) release to go along with the current three-drummer ...

Album Review

Travis & Fripp: Between the Silence

Read "Between the Silence" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
August 19, 2018

Having reformed in 2013 with its distinctive three-drummer frontline and hitting the road for the first time in over a decade the following year, King Crimson's guitarist/keyboardist and only remaining original member Robert Fripp is another example of a musician in his senior years maintaining a more active schedule than, perhaps, at any other time in his career. With the group gigging extensively every year since, Fripp has also been busy, between tours, overseeing a growing catalog of live audio ...