Jakko Jakszyk
Jakko Jakszyk joined King Crimson back in 2013, but spiritually he’s been with the band far longer. At one time he even formed a tribute outfit with some Crimson alumni – The 21st Century Schizoid Band – to play the band’s music, little thinking that one day he’d get the invitation from Fripp to join Crim’s division one.
“I was about 11, I think, when my next-door neighbour played me …Schizoid Man,” Jakko says. “It completely blew me away. He’d been playing me music from the 60s, which I liked, and then this came out of nowhere.”
Many fans of the band remember where they were when they heard the opening riff to 21st Century Schizoid Man followed by Robert Fripp’s aggressive fuzz chords and Greg Lake’s distorted vocals. It was music designed to make an impression, as was the album’s closer, The Court Of The Crimson King, with the Mellotron fanfare and Pete Sinfield’s otherworld lyrics.
Much of the music that came out in the late 1960s was different, but Crimson was something totally new. “This was from a completely different place,” Jakko tells us. “The way Robert played the guitar, the tone he had, nobody was doing that. It was completely unique to him, I think. His influences and inspiration were from a more European classical tradition than a blues-based American one.”
Since those days, the band has been through various line-ups with landmark albums such as , , and . But it’s only recently that the
