Robert Fripp - Interview: Toad's Place (New Haven , Ct. March 4, 1982)

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This short interview with guitarist Robert Fripp lays out among, other things, the essential precepts of the way the 1980-1984 King Crimson might operate musically. The ideas come from a very fertile period in Robert’s thinking, and off the back of co-operation with several others – David Bowie, Brian Eno, Daryll Hall, Peter Gabriel, Andy Summers and others. The idea that an established group might be put up on the garden shelf for a while and brought down again when there was useful work to be done with it – a tool with which you could effect change – stemmed from around this early 1980s period, and partially accounts for the long breaks in Crimson’s activities.

Getting people to do things in a particular way is what band leaders do. But you’re probably going to have to explain why. If Robert had arrived in the rehearsal room with armfuls of manuscript and simply told everyone what to play, as some people continue to insist he must have done, the band wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. But everyone had, in his words, “equal ruling authority”.

We were all fully empowered to nudge a growing collective composition into something that, at worst, we could all live with, and at best, something we felt might influence others in their way of thinking about and generating music. But knowing how far and in what direction to nudge was a delicate matter. Finding out what allows their colleagues to agree or refuse to do things is what better band-leaders do. Being able to react in the moment of listening to the things they actually do is what good performer-leaders can do.

A central requirement for any music I want to be a part of is, increasingly, interactive performance. Most music comprises some form of interaction, be it performer-performer, or performer-listener, but the type I’m talking about requires listening to a co-performer and the whole ensemble simultaneously and admitting the possibility of change. If not already possible, this sort of interaction may well be possible in real time with AI, in the very near future, but I’m more interested in the human than AI. I want to get to know the other person(s) on stage, and I want them to get to know me. I want to get to know myself through the same process.

All groups of performers have music interaction to some or lesser extent. If the audible part of (musician) Madonna’s current show is essentially pre-recorded, the interactive element would seem to lie within the domain of dance. At the opposite end of the spectrum, and starting with pioneer saxophonist Ornette Coleman, lie the brave souls who approach the stage with little or no prepared music at all: Evan Parker, the recently-deceased Peter-Brötzmann, Matthew Shipp and all. Those people get to know their co-performers’ choices, strengths, weaknesses extremely quickly.

Music originated at that end of the spectrum came to be known as jazz. You may make near-jazz with a computer, just as may make near-classical by having AI complete Beethoven’s 10th Symphony ( https://www.beethovenx-ai.com/), but neither endeavour excites me as much as counting to four and hearing myself trying to interact in real time with others.

But, hey, each to his own. That’s just me.

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