Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

The Met goes on ‘hot date with King Crimson’ for the prog rockers’ 50th anniversary show | Concert review

Marking a landmark anniversary becomes a bit complicated when a band’s history is as peppered with disbandings, dormancies, and wholesale reinventions, as is King Crimson’s. Fifty years on, all of those interruptions and transformations seem as integral to the band’s identity as its complex music.

King Crimson celebrated their 50th anniversary at the Met on Monday.
King Crimson celebrated their 50th anniversary at the Met on Monday.Read moreDean Stocking

Marking a landmark anniversary becomes a bit complicated when a band’s history is as peppered with disbandings, dormancies, and wholesale reinventions, as is King Crimson’s. Fifty years on, all of those interruptions and transformations seem as integral to the band’s identity as its epic, dizzyingly complex music — all equal parts of the inscrutable vision of Crimson’s wry mastermind, Robert Fripp.

Well before the guitar wizard took the stage at The Met on Monday night to perch beside his band of electronics, his disembodied voice addressed the crowd. Making a firm but gentle request that phones stay pocketed for the duration, Fripp instead invited the legion of dedicated fans (many sporting shirts from past tours, or earlier dates on the current one) along for a “hot date with King Crimson.”

The occasion is the golden anniversary of the legendary prog unit’s classic debut, In the Court of the Crimson King. Of course, only Fripp remains to recall that period of the band (though woodwind player Mel Collins would come along in 1970, stick around for two years, then find other things to occupy his time for four and a half decades before reconnecting for the current lineup). But the set on Monday would traipse through nearly every era that followed, from its folk and jazz-inflected early years through the virtuosic eccentricities of former front man Adrian Belew’s 30-year tenure.

However these songs sounded originally, in their current form they all take on the monumental power of its current muscular, drum-forward manifestation. Crimson’s latest seven-piece incarnation, which has been on the road since the band’s reactivation in 2013, is constructed around its drummers — three of them, placed front and center behind massive kits sporting a percussive arsenal. With all the high-wire precision and acrobatic agility of Cirque du Soleil, the trio (Pat Mastelotto, Gavin Harrison, and Jeremy Stacey, who doubled on keyboards) were jaw-droppingly attuned, whether playing in perfect synchronicity, in interlocking polyrhythms, or in echoing ripples passed along the stage.

Both of the evening’s two sets, which stretched to nearly three hours minus a 20-minute intermission, started off with a drum barrage serving as de facto overture. Following the extended rhythmic dance of “Hell Hounds of Krim,” the rest of the band finally erupted into “Neurotica,” from 1982’s Beat, with singer/guitarist Jakko Jakszyk muttering the song’s rapid-fire agitations.

From there the band skipped around from one decade to another, the newish “Suitable Grounds for the Blues” leading into the anthemic “Red,” the title track from the 1974 that preceded Crimson’s first hiatus; then back to the earliest years for the swooning “Moonchild” and the offbeat “Cat Food.”

The mood of a Crimson show can shift as suddenly and unexpectedly as its time signatures, as the wistful, yearning ballad “Islands” is overtaken by the machinelike pulse and blistering guitar flurries of “Easy Money,” then the doom-laden steamroller riffs of “Level Five” lead into the crescendoing drama of “Starless.” The mammoth rock sound can suddenly part like clouds to reveal a formal jazz band, as when Tony Levin took a compelling upright bass solo during “Moonchild,” or Collins burst into Ellington’s “Take the A Train” in the midst of the hard-rock encore “21st Century Schizoid Man.”