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Ian McDonald
McDonald began his music career as an army musician, where he learned several instruments and taught himself music theory. He co-founded King Crimson and appeared on their 1969 debut album In the Court of the Crimson King, playing Mellotron, keyboards and woodwinds. In the mid-1970s, he moved to New York City where he co-founded Foreigner, appearing on the group's first three albums. He later collaborated with Steve Hackett and played in the King Crimson spin-off group 21st Century Schizoid Band. He was also a session musician, predominantly as a saxophonist.
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Exposures
by John Kelman
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 ...
read moreKing Crimson: The Complete 1969 Recordings
by John Kelman
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 ...
read moreThe 21st Century Guide to King Crimson: Volume One 1969-1974
by John Kelman
Of all the groups to emerge from the late '60s-early '70s heyday of British Progressive Rock (capitals fully intended), no group has reinvented itself more frequently and, perhaps, more rapidly than King Crimson. As time has gone on the group's ostensible leader Robert Fripp has refashioned the group through periods of high melodrama to nuevo metal and just about everything in between. Until recently, new fans who wanted an overview of the band had to satisfy themselves with the 4-CD ...
read moreThird International, Featuring King Crimson's Ian McDonald - Beautiful Accident (2011)
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Something Else!
This is a different kind of blues record, one with a joltingly modern menace. The Third International's Beautiful Accident brilliantly updates a time-weathered genre by focusing on texture as much as lyrical content. In fact, sometimes the words are simply enveloped by the rising rabble of crunchy R&B riffs, prog-rock influenced song structures and pounding rhythms. That starts with the spooky shamble of The Timekeeper's Waltz." With its echoing, loony-bin beat and a chorus of smeared instruments, the track sounds ...
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