In Passing

At last I'm able to post again. I'd prepared this piece on Monday 26 February, but just couldn't get it up on the web. Well here goes anyway: King Crimson were and are my favourite band, if having a favourite means anything at my age. I fell in love with them at fourteen and consider their most recent studio album, The Power To Believe, one of their best. I've only seen them live three times though, all in Manchester in my early teenage years. I saw the Islands band twice and the five-piece responsible for Larks Tongues In Aspic once, and I've always regarded the former with affection (the latter with something like awe.) Growing up with Crimso has given me a kind of musical education, proving a way in to all sorts of odd sounds I don't think I would otherwise have picked up on. Reading of the death of Ian Wallace, the drummer with the Islands band (and on and off with quite a number of other luminaries of the world of rock & jazz, including Bob Dylan, circa Street Legal), the other day, was saddening, the more so as I'd greatly enjoyed his on-line diary with Robert Fripp's disciplineglobalmusic.com while it was running. His love of the music he played and of the football he watched - sadly a Liverpool supporter, but never mind - his sense of humour, his delight in his food and home life, his concern for tolerance & goodwill in the world, were conveyed in an attractively direct, honest, supremely likable way. It's not that long since Boz Burrell, the bass player and vocalist with the same line-up passed on, and Ian Wallace's tribute to his bandmate at that time captured so much of his own warmth. They'll make a tight rhythm section for the houseband in heaven