There’s a little run emanating from Fripp’s Saturn 09 keyboard that sounds like something you’d hear at a fun fair and although that is quickly subsumed into the more raucous and abstract offerings of Entry Of The Crims, the celebratory atmosphere somehow spills over into the rest of this gig. A great-sounding audience recording captures the band performing the second of three evenings in New York, a city that has taken Crimson to its beating heart since the group’s first visit in 1969.

A couple of decades on, although the line-up might have changed the surging drive and fearless spirit within the music has not. The only number in this set that was played in New York back in the 1970s is Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part II. Given something of a jackhammer rendition on this outing, Levin in particular sounds especially dangerous in the first of those punctuating breaks, going on to weave a fascinating thread across and up the fretboard during the rest of the piece.

Levin shows a more genteel side with a ruminative improv intro to Sartori In Tangier, a number whose fiery acrobatics finds favour with the crowd. If Dig Me pushes the idea of what constitutes a song into some interesting and extreme spaces, there’s no such ambiguity to the catchy Three Of A Perfect Pair and the perfectly infectious Sleepless, performed with a hopped-up energy befitting the city that never sleeps.

2 September 2024