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“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” says Linda Martell, a country music pioneer, in the intro to Beyoncé’s “Spaghettii.” “In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand, but in practice, well, some may feel confined.” Those two sentences perfectly sum up how Beyoncé has subverted expectations in recent years by spreading her wings beyond pop, hip-hop, and R&b to infuse rock, house, and now country music into her own unique style that ultimately really is just “Beyoncé.”

On her latest album,...

King Crimson’s beloved Eighties albums Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair will be brought back to life in the fall on a special tour featuring guitarist Steve Vai, Tool drummer Danny Carey, Crimson singer/guitarist Adrian Belew, and Crimson bassist Tony Levin. The Beat tour kicks off September 12 in San Jose, California, and wraps up November 8 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Ticket sales begin April 5.

Crimson founder Robert Fripp reanimated King Crimson in 1981 after a seven-year hiatus. The only member from the Seventies version he brought back into...

Rolling Stone interview series Unknown Legends features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and veteran musicians who have toured and recorded alongside icons for years, if not decades. All are renowned in the business, but some are less well known to the general public. Here, these artists tell their complete stories, giving an up-close look at life on music’s A list. This edition features backup bassist Billy Sherwood.

If you saw Yes on the 1994 Talk tour and then again anytime during the past seven years, you were essentially seeing two different bands.

Toby Amies on Robert Fripp and In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50: “It’s an interrogation into what I find around me and the circumstances in which I find myself and especially the relationships that I observe and I’m involved in.” Photo: Toby Amies

Toby Amies’s perceptive and imaginative In the Court Of The Crimson King: King Crimson At 50, captures the essence of the individual current and former members of King Crimson through candid and forthcoming on-camera interviews, sound checks, and the cost of being on the road. The director pulls the curtain back with precision to give us a distinctive look into Robert Fripp the master himself, the groups leader and disciplinarian.

Toby Amies with Anne-Katrin Titze on In The Court Of The Crimson King: King Crimson At 50: “I was in a very interesting position making this film because on the...

Yes drummer Alan White, who joined the progressive rock band in 1972 and stayed with them for the next 50 years, has died at 72 after a brief illness.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee is most famous for his work in Yes, but also performed with John Lennon in the Plastic Ono Band — He’s featured on both “Instant Karma” and “Imagine” — and with George Harrison on All Things Must Pass.

“Throughout his life and six-decade career, Alan was many things to many people,” his family wrote in a statement confirming his death.

Received rock wisdom teaches us that punk and prog are sworn enemies. But by the early-to-mid-2000s, genres that seemed worlds apart in the late Seventies had started to creep closer together. The Mars Volta’s psychedelic 2002 post-hardcore fever dream De-Loused in the Comatorium suggested a wondrous hybrid; further underground, a one-off album by an obscure New York band called Gospel made these active ingredients explode. The band quickly frayed, but the LP — The Moon Is a Dead World, which expertly grafts shrieking desperation onto virtuosic synth-driven mini-epics — has become a cult classic,...

At one point during In the Court of the Crimson King, a new doc about mighty prog institution King Crimson, former drummer Bill Bruford zeroes in on the core philosophy of the band and its founder, guitarist Robert Fripp. “Change is essential,” says Bruford, who now resembles a pithy, distinguished university professor. “Otherwise, you turn into the Moody Blues, for heaven’s sake.”

Starting in 1969, no one ever confused King Crimson with the far more radio-friendly Moodies. In 2019, the latest incarnation of Crimso, still fronted by Fripp, embarked on a 50th-anniversary tour,...

An upcoming documentary will provide a rare look at the inner workings of King Crimson, one of rock’s most respected but also mysterious bands. Titled In the Court of the Crimson King, after the group’s legendary 1969 debut, the film will premiere at South by Southwest this March, and a new trailer is available to view now.

As seen in the trailer, the film follows the most recent incarnation of King Crimson, a three-drummer “double quartet,” on tour in 2018 and 2019. We see intimate, fly-on-wall footage of the band onstage,...

Rolling Stone interview series Unknown Legends features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and veteran musicians who have toured and recorded alongside icons for years, if not decades. All are renowned in the business, but some are less well known to the general public. Here, these artists tell their complete stories, giving an up-close look at life on music’s A list. This edition features drummer Chester Thompson.

When Chester Thompson joined Genesis as a drummer for the Wind and Wuthering tour in 1977, he had every reason to think...

Genesis announced a 10-date reunion tour of the U.K. and Ireland this morning. It’s their first tour since 2007, their first time playing since Phil Collins suffered nerve damage that makes it impossible for him to drum or even stand for long periods of time, and their first tour with Phil’s teenage son Nic on drums.

The news is a huge deal for fans of the progressive-rock band, but the original announcement was short on details. It merely lists the five musicians on the tour (Phil Collins, Tony Banks,...

Retirement is a fluid concept in music, but at 10 years and counting, Bill Bruford’s just might be the real deal. Since he announced he was calling it quits in 2009, the prog drumming legend — who worked with Yes, King Crimson, and Genesis before founding his own long-running jazz group, Earthworks, and came in at number 16 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Drummers list — hasn’t performed in public a single time, and he doesn’t see that changing anytime soon.

“I think to play rock — to play any kind of music,...

In this second installment of our two-part deep-dive into the history and influence of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” we look at how various lineups of the band have made the song their own, and how it’s inspired artists from the worlds of prog, metal, punk, hip-hop, and beyond during the past half-century. To read the first part — in which members of the original King Crimson look back on the writing of “Schizoid Man,” and contemporaries recount its initial impact onstage and on LP — click here.

“21st...

In this first installment of our two-part deep dive into the history and influence of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” the band’s co-founders look back on the writing of the iconic song, and contemporaries recount its initial impact onstage and on LP. To read the second part — which traces how various lineups of the band have made “Schizoid Man” their own during the past half-century, and how it’s inspired artists from the worlds of prog, metal, punk, hip-hop, and beyond — click here.

Late one night in...

Coming onstage at 10:30 a.m. London time on Saturday, Robert Fripp got right to the point. “I don’t know what your personal aims are for today, but I’ll declare mine,” the guitarist and longtime King Crimson bandleader said. “My primary interest is to introduce King Crimson to innocent ears, that is, to audiences who have never before seen King Crimson live.”

Chances are, very few of the people sitting before him fell into that category. The room — an intimate upstairs space in the October Gallery in Holborn — was filled with around 40 journalists,...

If Alan White’s résumé was limited to playing drums on John Lennon’s Imagine and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, it would be pretty impressive. But about two years after appearing on those pivotal Beatles solo records, he was recruited by Yes — then at the peak of their creative powers — to replace the outgoing Bill Bruford. The band has seen a ludicrous amount of lineup changes since that time, but the one constant has been White’s presence behind the drum kit. These days, back issues limit...

For most of their existence, King Crimson have been one of rock’s least nostalgic bands. Through frequent lineup changes and a staunch commitment to starting from scratch with each new phase, bandleader Robert Fripp has preserved the sense of risk and experimentation that marked their landmark 1969 debut In the Court of the Crimson King.

But in honor of their 50th birthday this year, Fripp & Co. are allowing themselves the luxury of looking backward. In addition to a worldwide tour, the group’s Kc 50 campaign — unveiled five decades to the...

"Don't let your hands dictate what you think you can do. Look at fingerboard charts and imagine your eyes dancing on the notes you want to play, and forget about whether your hands can do it or not. Just try it."

Allan Holdsworth (6 August 1946 – 15 April 2017), British guitarist and composer. He released twelve studio albums as a solo artist and played a variety of musical styles spanning a period of more than four decades, but is best known for his work in prog rock and jazz fusion. He was in the super group U.K. with Bill Bruford, Eddie Jobson and John Wetton as well as Soft Machine, Pierre Moerlen's Gong, and The New Tony Williams Lifetime. An amazingly talented guitarist, his contributions to music will be missed. Rip, Mr. Holdsworth.

R.I.P., Mr. John Wetton, you provided many of the songs for the soundtrack of my youth with your bass playing, and vocals, in Roxy Music, King Crimson, Uriah Heap, Asia, and your debut album with the quartet U.K. embedded above. For me you reached the zenith of your artistic expression with said progressive rock super band. From 1977 until 1980, you, keyboardist/electric violinist Eddie Jobson (Curved Air, Roxy Music, Frank Zappa), guitarist Allan Holdsworth (Soft Machine, Tempest, The New Tony Williams Lifetime, Gong) through 1978, and drummer Bill Bruford (Yes, King Crimson, tour drummer for Genesis), who was later replaced by drummer Terry Bozzio (formerly of Frank Zappa's band). There is some tremendous Youtube footage of the reformed U,K, with Wetton, Eddie Jobson and Terry Bozzio from their 2012 world tour. No doubt King Crimson, circa 1972 - 1974, boasting guitar maestro Robert Fripp, Wetton, violinist/keyboardist David Cross and drummer...

When we celebrated David Bowie's 65th birthday last year, we never would have dreamt of what would happen 12 months on. Back from the (as good as) dead, Db returned with The Next Day and we're only just getting over the shock.

To celebrate his unexpected comeback, BBC Two presents a brand-new documentary about our greatest popstar, and having had a sneak preview, Digital Spy gives you five compelling reasons to watch Five Years.

> Ten Things About... David Bowie

1. Golden Years

The structure of Five Years makes it a lot more interesting than your usual pop doc. Rather than try (and fail) to talk about 50 years of pop superstardom in two hours, the film gives us five year-long snapshots. Year One: 1971-1972 (Hunky Dory to ...Ziggy Stardust), Year Two: 1974-1975 (Young Americans to Station to Station), Year Three: 1976-1977 (Low to "Heroes"), Year Four: 1979-1980 (Scary Monsters... And Super...

The original U.K. (1978) was almost unquestionably the greatest "supergroup" (i.e., made up of known musicians from other top-flight groups) in rock history. The first iteration consisted of Bill Bruford (Yes, King Crimson) on drums, John Wetton (King Crimson) on bass, Eddie Jobson (Frank Zappa) on keyboards and violin, and Allan Holdsworth (Soft Machine, Gong) on guitar.

They recorded just one album (U.K.), but for progressive rock fans it remains among the greatest prog-rock albums of all time. Holdsworth left due to creative differences, and Bruford left to rejoin King Crimson and was replaced by Terry Bozzio (Frank Zappa). The remaining trio also produced just one album (Danger Money). The members then split, and U.K. was no more. However, Jobson and Wetton apparently retained joint title to the group's name, and there were a few later iterations of U.K., though never with both of its founders.

Among the seminal progressive rock groups of the late '60s and early '70s, Yes has undergone its share of personnel changes. The group started out with Chris Squire (bass), Peter Banks (guitar), Jon Anderson (vocals), Bill Bruford (drums), and Tony Kaye (keyboards), and released two albums, the eponymous Yes, and Time and A Word. Banks either left or was fired (it depends on who you believe), and was replaced with Steve Howe. [N.B. Peter Banks passed away in March 2013.] This new line-up produced just one album, The Yes Album.

Kaye left due to band friction, and was replaced by Rick Wakeman. This line-up produced two albums, Fragile and Close to the Edge -- the latter being the band's tour-de-force, and one of the most revered progressive rock albums of all time (see my Cc article, The Absolutely Essential Progressive Rock Albums), as well as one of the first albums on which the entire first side...

1963

Johnny Cash: Blood, Sweat and Tears (Columbia)

Some of Cash's '60s concept albums were burdened with much too talking between tracks; here the tribute to the American working man gets to mostly stand alone on its musical merits, and shines. Notably, it incluces the top version of the traditional "John Henry"” about the most legendarily heroic working man ever, and the version of "Casey Jones" here is classic as well. Politically and psychologically, Cash was the perfect man for this job.

1968

Byrds: Notorious Byrd Brothers (Columbia)

Sometimes transitional albums, confusing listeners expecting a group's earlier style, are underrated. Not so with this classic. It's true that it didn't sell as well as earlier Byrds LPs, nor did the single from the album chart very high, but for decades Notorious Byrd Brothers has been widely revered, and not just by fans; some critics have even anointed it as the band's best album.

Yes, I have too much time on my hands. Here's a new feature that was fun to put together (though quite time-consuming, which makes me worry about my ability to do this every month). I look back at rock, pop, and R&B albums that came out five years ago, ten years ago, etc.

1967

Buffalo Springfield: Again (Atco)

There was much chaos surrounding the creation of this quintet 's second album. Bassist Bruce Palmer, in some ways the soul of the band, was unavailable due to a drug charge deportation, and a string of session players took his place. Stephen Stills, who saw himself as the leader of the group, was feuding with Neil Young, who considered himself an equal, and Young actually quit -- but returned. And that's without getting into the fiasco that was the band's management team.

Nonetheless, it was a quantum leap forward from their debut,...