[atlantaprog] Re: atlantaprog Digest V1 #86

Reflections on the performance at the Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, Georgia, 
Friday,
23 April, 2004.
by Wheat Williams

I was only five when the first Krimso album came out, and I must have been in my
early twenties before I went back and listened to what I missed. As for this 
band,
I was astonished by the passion and intensity with which this ensemble 
interpreted
their work from thirty-five to thirty years ago. 

Some of these gentlemen have been below the radar for many years, others not so 
much, but either each of them has kept his musicianship up at the highest level 
all these years, or they have practiced very, very hard since deciding to give 
birth
to this band. 

Jakko Jakszyk won me over. He had to work bloody hard to do it. In an even more 
un-enviable task than that of our local boy Jimmy Herring's posthumous stand-in
for Jerry Garcia in The Dead, Jakszyk had to cover the parts of--hands 
down--rock's
most inscrutable, least emulatable guitarist. And four different, very 
distinctive
singers, at the same time. Jakko, God bless 'im, made no attempt to sound like 
any
of the singers he was tasked with covering. He was not afraid to show that his 
grown-up,
clear tenor voice could sometimes soar past those very young men of record, each
of whom, in the early 70s, had neither the technique nor the weight to properly 
bear the world-weary lyrics of Pete Sinfield (beyond his years too) and those 
wide-ranging
melodies. As far as the guitar, Jakszyk nailed Fripp's nimble notes and phrasing
as often as he chose to, but he never once used Fripp's thick Les Paul Custom 
mastodon-in-magohany tone. He used his 21st-century Parker's updated timbral 
palette
to produce a quicker, acoustic-like attack, more articulate note definition in 
the
chords, and the steely agility of a championship fencer with a quick foil--which
is visually hard to reconcile with his almost comical stumbling around the stage
when not centered at the microphone and singing.

But the glue that held the band, the repertoire, and the reason for being 
together
were Ian McDonald and Mel Collins. Let us bow our heads and remember that in the
earliest days, the golden age, before the genre labels were coined or applied, 
the
saxophone was a heavy metal instrument. In fact, the heaviest; just ask any 
metallurgist.
The alloy of mahogany and maple can't match brass for density, used either for 
finesse
or blunt trauma, neither on stage nor in the mass spectrometer. Seeing McDonald 
and Collins, pushing 60, sharing a stage and blowing in tandem for effectively 
the
first time in history, revealed a primal force of nature that audiences in 1971 
probably couldn't have withstood and lived to tell about it. Fortunately the 
perspective
of time and the maturation of their years have provided us with the context, and
the 21st Century Schizoid Band have provided us the means to appreciate their 
innovative
contributions. I feel privileged to have witnessed it.

Wheat Williams
5345 Pinnacle Peak Lane
Norcross, GA 30071-4914
USA
770-448-9734
wheat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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