King Crimson percussionist Jamie Muir, who famously left the band to become a Buddhist monk in 1973, has died, aged 82.
Former Crimson drummer Bill Bruford announced Muir’s passing on his own Facebook page, paying tribute to his former colleague. “Jamie Muir died today 17.02.2025 in Cornwall, UK, with his brother George by his side.
Jamie was the drummer/percussionist with whom I worked on the King Crimson album Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (1973). He had a volcanic effect on me, professionally and personally, in the brief time we were together many years ago – an effect which I still remember half a century later. I’m sorry we lost touch, but his departure from our working relationship was so sudden and unexpected, I sort of assumed he didn’t want anything more to do with me and my colleagues in King Crimson!
He was a lovely, artistic man, childlike in his gentleness. There was probably a dark side underneath. It could be glimpsed as he climbed the PA stacks in a wolf’s fur jacket, blood (from a capsule) pouring from his mouth, on a rainy Thursday night in Preston, Lancs., to hurl chains across the stage at his drumkit. One of these Robert Fripp will tell you, only narrowly missed him.
His conversations with Jon Anderson at my 1973 wedding party, in Jon’s words, ‘changed my life’.
Jamie also changed mine.I consider it a privilege to have known, and benefitted from the company of, a man of such quiet power, even briefly. He struck me as one of those about whom one might truthfully say he was a beautiful human being. He will be much missed. Goodbye, Jamie.”
Born in Edinburgh in November 1942, Muir would attend that city’s College Of Art in the 60s. Early on he was intrigued with jazz music. An early stint on the trombone gave way to drumming and he looked to the likes of Tony Williams and Pharoah Sanders for inspiration, as well as the opportunities of improvisation, of which he said, “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.”
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Having moved to London, Muir worked with choreographer Lindsay Kemp and played music with the free-jazz outfit Music Improvisation Company, and also with Pete Brown And The Battered Ornaments, Boris and Assaga and also Allan Holdsworth in the short-lived jazz-rock band Sunship, during which time he began to collect the arsenal of household objects he would use with his drum kit and for which he became famous in King Crimson, whom he joined following a request from Fripp in 1972.
Muir was inspired by Crimson’s “potential and creating monstrous power in music” and his standard drum kit was now bedecked with rattles, bird calls, car horns, chimes, bells, gongs, metal sheets, tuned drums, plastic bottles. In his 2023 King Crimson Prog cover story on the making of Lark’s Tongues… writer Mike Barnes points out that “at a time when to be weird was cool, press shots of Muir leaning towards the camera grinning through a waxed moustache while playing a bowed saw piqued the interest.”
Legend has it that Muir gave the album its title, telling Fripp when he asked what he though the music sounded like, “why, larks’ tongues in aspic … what else?”.
Muir abruptly quit Crimson following the album’s release. The aforementioned conversation withJon Anderson, suggesting the Yes singer read Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography Of A Yogi, when Anderson asked Muir what made him perform the way he did.
“He was an unbelievable stage performer,” Anderson told Prog writer Sid Smith during an interview about Yes’s 1973 album Tales From Topographic Oceans, inspired by Muir’s suggestion. “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.”
Despite a news story from King Crimson’s management that a “personal injury sustained onstage during performance” was the reason for Muir’s absence, he had in fact moved to the Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland to pursue a Buddhist life.
“There were experiences over a period of about six months which caused me to decide to give up music, so one morning I felt I had to go to E.G. management and tell them,” Muir recalled. “It was difficult of course, a whole year of tours had just been lined up… I didn’t feel too 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.”
Interestingly, Fripp himself would quit King Crimson in 1974 having discovered the writings of English mystic J.G. Bennett, whch, according to Crimson biographer Sid Smith had “deeply and profoundly resonated with him, confirming his sense of needing to alter the course of his life.”
Muir would return to both London, and music, in the 1980s, playing with both Derek Bailey and Evan Parker of Music Improvisation Company, as well as former King Crimson drummer Michael Giles on the soundtrack to the 1983 British independent film Ghost Dance.
By 1990 however, Muir had left music behind him, and devoted his time to painting, the discipline he remained with until his death.
