King Crimson - Prism (Live At The Warfield Theatre, 1995)
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King Crimson songs were almost always collaborations from within the band or one or two outsiders, such as Richard-Palmer James who collaborated with bassist John Wetton on lyrics for the band in the 1970s. Unusually for King Crimson, then, this piece is a rearrangement, a cover version.
For a while, in the 80s through mid-90s, we had three drummers in the band: Bruford, Belew and Mastelotto. It seemed right that we percussionistas should do something. I suggested ‘Prism’ from the Swiss jazz drummer Pierre Favre, that I’d come across on Pierre’s mid-1980s ECM album ‘Singing Drums’.
The arrangement we have here is perhaps a little ham-fisted. It sort of gets the ‘big-rock’ treatment, one that doesn’t suit everything, and some of the charm of the original got rubbed out here with this sledge-hammer arrangement. Pat Mastelotto and I remained seated at our kits with our third drummer, Adrian Belew, making a fleeting appearance playing drum samples from his guitar via MIDI.
On earlier tours, we had used a percussion piece of mine called Conundrum, but staged it with all three drummers at the front of the stage, a much more satisfactory way to present a trio within the sextet. Conundrum had a lot to do with the oiled torsos and muscular sound of Japanese Taiko drummers, although we were some way away from achieving that level of artistry. In truth there is a much cooler reading of Prism on a 2019 Summerfold Records album called ‘The Percussion Collection feat. Bill Bruford’. It’s the music behind some very hip editing on this ad for the album: / 389349998612825 .
I used the piece for a third and final time on an album called ‘Coat of Many Colors’ by the World Drummers Ensemble, featuring percussionists Chad Wackerman, Luis Conte and Senegalese master drummer, the late Doudou N'Diaye Rose, and myself. Without obvious definite Western pitches, your sense of melody goes to the semi-definite pitches of the drums, increasing and refining your awareness of pitch.
So we had a percussion group lurking within the larger Crimson ensemble. Listening and watching again here reminds me of my time with the New Percussion Group of Amsterdam. That group’s members used their down-time from their ‘day-job’ with the world-famous Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to present new cutting-edge percussion works that were impossible to perform inside the conservative and highly controlled repertoire of the Orchestra, a Dutch national institution. They were essentially renegade percussionistas, looking to get their teeth into something more meaty, from a percussion perspective, than, say, Brahms.
Pat, Adrian and I had a lot of fun working on Conundrum and Prism and bringing them to the big stage with Crimson. Thanks for listening, if you did!
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