“The Future Only If You Can See It”: The Musical And Spiritual Jamie Muir

Jamie Muir is best known for being the auxiliary percussionist on the album Larks’ Tongues in Aspic by King Crimson, but outside of that has led a bizarrely diverse life – including painting, studying free improvisation, using trash to make music, and spending nearly a decade living a monastic life.

Muir was always active in free improvisation – that is, music where absolutely nothing is written beforehand. He started studying at the Edinburgh College of Art in the 1960s playing jazz trombone, but soon switched to percussion, saying he preferred to be “in the wilds of uncertainty.”

He played with Derek Bailey and Evan Parker in a group called The Music Improvisation Company, where Muir started using “found objects” in his playing – finding and using objects that are not proper instruments to make sounds in a musical context. Muir was interested in not only finding new sounds, but also the experience of the unpredictability of how the new objects would sound. Talking about how he would find what objects to use, he said:

“I much prefer junk shops to antique shops. There’s nothing to find in an antique shop – it’s all been found already; whereas in a junk shop it’s only been collected. But a rubbish dump – a rubbish dump has been neither found nor collected – in fact it’s been completely rejected – the future if only you can see it.”

Throughout his whole career, it seems that whenever Muir worked with somebody, he impacted them and changed their way of thinking in one way or another. When talking about playing with Muir in TMIC, Bailey said that he:

“…seemed to be able to provide a different playing experience every time…He fitted into this idea of having no particular preconceptions…He was a highly reactive person, one of the things I really liked, there was the impression that he was slightly uncontrollable, on an edge.”

Muir’s wild personality and interest in improvisation set him up to be the perfect candidate when Robert Fripp was trying to find new members for his band King Crimson. Fripp had been interested in asking Muir to join, as well as asking drummer Bill Bruford, who had just left the band Yes. Fripp liked each one’s playing, but was unsure of which one would be a better fit for the sound he was going for. While sitting in the bath one night he had the idea to just go ahead and use both of them.

KC live: Muir on the right, Bruford on the left, and John Wetton in the middle playing bass.

And so it was, with Bruford on drum set and Muir on any other percussive sounds, the new lineup of King Crimson recorded and released their album Larks Tongues in Aspic – the title came from a statement Muir made when he was asked what he thought the music sounds like. The album features many long instrumental songs and passages, complex rhythmic patterns and time signatures, a great influence from Eastern styles of improvisation, and a never ending source of timbres and mixtures of them.

Muir’s untamed personality was also present while on stage, and he apparently would throw chains around, spit blood, and scowl at people in the audience. King Crimson violinist David Cross recalled that:

“Jamie’s onstage persona never manifested itself in rehearsals…I could have died when I first saw him start his antics on stage for the first time. I thought it was wonderful but we had no idea he was going to do it – it was completely out of the blue.”

Bruford also greatly admired Muir, and said that he was:

“…my biggest influence and the guy who turned my head totally around…God, did he open my eyes. Jamie saw above and beyond chops. He was into the color of the music, the tone, and being intuitive about it…[he] taught me to try to see life from the far side of the cymbals: drummers can be very myopic. He also pointed out – and I consider this my first and best drum lesson – that I exist to serve the music, the music does not exist to serve me.”

Continuing the theme that Muir changes the life of everyone he meets, it was also around this time that Muir attended Brufords wedding, which the lead singer of Yes Jon Anderson was also at. Muir and Anderson had a long conversation at the reception, and Muir recommended that Anderson read Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, a book on Eastern spirituality. Anderson was deeply impacted by his interaction with Muir, saying that:

“He was an unbelievable stage performer…I wanted to know what made him do that, what had influenced him. He said to me, ‘Here, read it,’ and it started me off on the path of becoming aware that there was even a path…Jamie was like a messenger for me and came to me at the perfect time in my life…he changed my life.”

Andersons interaction with this book also led to the creation of Yes’s concept double-album Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Unfortunately, Muir did not stay with King Crimson long enough to even tour for Larks Tongues in Aspic. For several months he had been thinking about quitting music to pursue a monastic lifestyle following Buddhist principles, and a little over a week after the album had released he told the bands record label that he was quitting. For some reason, the record label stated he left due to an on-stage injury, which greatly confused Muir.

In the 80s Muir returned to music, working again with members of The Music Improvisation Company and doing other smaller projects. In the 90s he left music again to devote his energy to painting, and as far as I can find has done that ever since – unfortunately, I also haven’t been able to find any examples of his paintings online.

Fripp continued with the “multiple percussionists” idea, and more recently has even had three drummers.

Given how prolific Muir was throughout his entire life, it’s disappointing that so little of it exists in some kind of preserved format, whether it be recordings of more of his music or his paintings being available to be seen online. I would really love to be able to hear Muir’s early works with improvisation and found object percussion before he joined King Crimson, but unfortunately it just doesn’t exist. I would also love to meet him someday – given the way everybody talks about him, I feel like he would have all of the answers to my spiritual and musical questions that I yearn for.

You can listen to Muir and all of his auxillerous percussive abilities here in the first track from Larks Tongues in Aspic: