Jamie in Music - Mike Morrish- 2025

During his time studying painting at the Edinburgh School of Art, in the mid-1960s, Jamie played trombone in a jazz band. After dropping out of college in 1967, he switched to percussion, which he said: ‘took him into the wilds of uncertainty’. He was listening to American jazz drummers like Kenny Clarke, a stalwart of bebop; Tony Williams, a young modernist with Miles Davis’s quintet; and Milford Graves, a pioneer of avant-garde drumming.

The 1960’s saw the development of ‘the new wave in jazz’, which championed ‘free improvisation’. This revolutionary mode of playing abandoned the harmonic foundations and regular timekeeping of earlier styles to focus on pure melody and unstructured rhythmic patterns. Jamie was also influenced by tenor saxophonists such as Pharoah Sanders, a musical partner of celebrated tenor saxist John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler. Ayler’s extreme solos polarised listeners at a time when ‘Black Power’ was in its ascendancy: he stated that ‘It’s not about notes anymore. It’s about feelings.’ Jamie became involved in ‘free jazz’ group The Assassination Weapon which played in a pub, with a light show, until banned by police ‘for inducing a drug-like atmosphere’.

London

When Jamie moved to London he worked as a department store assistant and played percussion with a variety of bands. These included poet and singer Pete Brown’s Battered Ornaments, jazz-rock outfit Sunship, and Afro-rockers Assegai. He also formed a free improvisation group with Christine Jeffrey and Hugh Davies called Heavy African Envelope. This led to him recording and playing with established free improvisors Derek Bailey (guitar) and Evan Parker (tenor sax) in the Music Improvisation Company between 1968 and 1971. An ECM album by the group was released in 1970. That year Jamie joined the four-piece rock band Boris, alongside jazz saxophonist Don Weller. The group received an enthusiastic recommendation from Melody Maker and an interview with Jamie subsequently appeared in the music paper.

Improvisation

By the 1970s Jamie was a thoroughly experienced and confident improvisor. His views on the value of improvisation were clear cut and committed:

‘I think group improvisation is one of the great forms of 20th Century music because it’s so radical. It should be listened to live and not in an intellectual way. A lot of other music is quite absurdly intellectual. I just had to improvise. The first time it felt really dangerous, like the sort of thing you had to lock the doors and close the curtains on because if anybody saw you, God would strike you down with a thunderbolt. But I took to it like a duck to water.’

Derek Bailey recalled that Jamie ‘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 he was slightly uncontrollable, on an edge.’

As well as playing a standard drumkit, Jamie’s arsenal of percussion instruments included chimes, bells, gongs, mbiras (thumb pianos), a musical saw, shakers, rattles, various found objects and assorted drums. His approach to finding unconventional objects to play was unusual:

‘I much prefer junk shops to antique shops…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.’

King Crimson

In July 1969 the progressive rock group King Crimson, led by guitarist Robert Fripp, appeared live in Hyde Park at the Rolling Stones’ free concert attended by 250,000 people. In November their debut album ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ reached No.5 in the UK charts, going on to achieve global success. In July 1972 Fripp phoned Jamie and invited him to join a brand new version of King Crimson, which had already been through two major changes of personnel.

‘Bob called, I had a blow with them and there was no question of doing anything else. Right from that first talk on the ‘phone it was inevitable.’

‘King Crimson was ideal for me because it was a rock band with more than 3 brain cells. I felt completely at home.’

The lineup of the group was Robert Fripp (guitar, mellotron), David Cross (violin, keyboards), John Wetton (bass, vocals), Bill Bruford (drums), Jamie Muir (percussion and allsorts). In Jamie’s view it was focused on ‘group potential and creating monstrous power in music.’ Rehearsals began in early September and the group made its live debut in mid-October at the Zoom Club, Frankfurt. Between November 10th and December 15th King Crimson played a 27 date UK tour, receiving considerable critical acclaim in the music press.

Jamie’s presence had a profound effect on the group’s modus operandi, moderating the strict control Fripp imposed and exploring the boundaries of improvisation. The quintet was a tight, more dynamic unit, sharper and weightier. Jamie’s on-stage persona made him a magnetic focus for audiences. The critic Richard Williams asserted that, of all the former art students who moved into rock in the 60s and 70s, ‘none brought with them a greater sense of anarchic spectacle’. He described Jamie sporting ‘a bearskin bolero, orange loon pants, a waxed moustache, an infectious grin and an instinct for disruption.’ A review in Sounds captured the visual impact of his performance: ‘Jamie Muir is the wild one. He’s the one who bounces rather than walks on stage with King Crimson, wears what I can only describe as fur wings over his boiler suit, leaves his percussion periodically to writhe around stage brandishing beaters, flails his gongs with chains, has been known to run screaming through the audience during a set, and climaxes a solo by spitting blood.’

Larks’ Tongues in Aspic 

Over the winter of 1972/73 King Crimson went into the studio to make an album of the music they had played on tour. When asked by Fripp what the music sounded like, Jamie replied ‘Why, larks’ tongues in aspic…what else?’, and so the album was named. Released in April 1973, ‘Lark’s Tongues in Aspic’ reached No.20 in the UK charts. Predominantly instrumental, it benefited from Fripp’s improved compositional skills while giving free rein to the percussive mayhem of Muir and Bruford. This added to the textural range demonstrated by the title track opener, which one critic referred to as ‘a radical collision of extraordinarily precise orchestral rock with the atonal rhythms of Tibetan gamelan.’

This landmark album showed a transformed King Crimson, even though it could not match the intensity and excitement of their live performances. Pivotal as Jamie’s percussion work was, his influence on the band also worked at a deeper level. Bill Bruford had learned much from Jamie’s free approach to percussion and had incorporated these elements into his own playing. ‘He was my biggest influence, the guy who really turned my head around…he was into the colour of the music, the tone, and being intuitive about it. He pointed out that I exist to serve the music, the music does not exist to serve me, and I consider this my first and best drum lesson.’

Leaving King Crimson

On February 9th 1973, very shortly after the recording of Larks’ Tongues in Aspic was completed, Jamie played his final gig with King Crimson at London’s Marquee Club. He wrote to Robert Fripp, telling him that he was leaving the band to live a life of spirituality. After reading the book ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ by Paramahansa Yogananda, he had decided to become a Buddhist monk. He returned to Scotland and spent several years in retreat and meditation at the Samye Ling monastery near Eskdalemuir in Dumfries and Galloway. His departure from King Crimson was on the eve of a major tour of the UK, Europe and the USA. ‘I didn’t feel happy about letting people down, but this was something I had to do or else it would have been a source of deep regret for the rest of my life.’

He told Fripp that his time with the band had represented ‘an overall enlarging of possibilities and many aural delights’. However, Jamie felt his freedom of spirit was not in tune with Fripp’s more calculated approach to music. ‘I think I was a wee bit too much for him, simply because I was so involved in improvisation. He was very much concerned with logic and function; he always worked his solos out before playing them… For a person like him it was a very admirable creative decision to actually work with someone like me.’

Return to music

In 1980 Jamie resumed his links with the improvised music scene in London. He made a duo recording with Derek Bailey, ‘Dart Drug’, on Bailey’s Incus label (1981). He was also associated with Bailey’s loose improvising collective, Company, appearing on three recordings: ‘Company 1981’, ‘Company 1983’ and ‘Trios’ (1986). In 1983 he joined another former colleague from the Music Improvisation Company, Evan Parker, to make an album ‘The Ayes Have It’, with Paul Rogers on bass. In the same year Jamie teamed up with King Crimson’s original drummer, Michael Giles, and David Cunningham to appear on the soundtrack of the film ‘Ghost Dance’. Jamie finally withdrew from the music business around 1990 to concentrate exclusively on painting.

Tributes

Following Jamie’s death on February 17th 2025, many tributes appeared on social media, including these from his former band mates in King Crimson:

Robert Fripp: ‘Jamie Muir was a major, and continuing influence on my thinking, not only musical. A wonderful and mysterious person. Of the five members of King Crimson 1972, Jamie had the greatest  authority, experience and presence.’

Bill Bruford: ‘He was a lovely, artistic man, childlike in his gentleness. There was probably a dark side underneath. A man of such quiet power… a beautiful human being.’