BEAT with Adrian Belew, Steve Vai, Tony Levin, Terry Bozzio and King Crimson

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Explore Adrian Belew

Adrian Belew is a guitarist and singer who turned the electric guitar into a source of sounds it was never built to make — animal calls, sirens, engine noise — without ever losing the song underneath them. He fronts BEAT, the four-piece that performs the music King Crimson made in the early 1980s. That repertoire is the three albums of 1981 to 1984 — Discipline, Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair — music built on interlocking guitar patterns that mesh like gear teeth, odd metres that resolve where you do not expect them to, and Belew's plain, melodic singing riding over the top of it. The group treats the material as something to reinterpret rather than reproduce, so the arrangements move rather than sitting still. This is not a tribute band playing another act's songs. Belew was King Crimson's guitarist and frontman across that period and wrote and sang the material; Tony Levin, on bass and Chapman Stick, plays parts he devised himself. Steve Vai takes the second guitar role, the one Robert Fripp occupied. Fripp is not in the group — he endorsed the project and supplied its name, which is the title of the 1982 album. In performance the appeal is precision. Two guitars playing different patterns at different speeds have to stay locked for the music to work at all, and hearing that held together in a room, with the Chapman Stick filling a register neither guitar reaches, is why this material rewards a live setting. Belew is an animated frontman, and the sound effects are played rather than triggered. It is for listeners who know these records and want them opened up rather than recited, and for anyone curious what happens when virtuosity is spent on interlock instead of on solos.