Early life and career William James Graham Muir was born in
Edinburgh, Scotland, on 4 July 1945. He attended the
Edinburgh College of Art during the 1960s, and began playing jazz on trombone. He soon lost interest and switched to percussion, stating that he preferred to be "in the wilds of uncertainty". At that time, he listened to American jazz drummers such as
Tony Williams,
Kenny Clarke, and
Milford Graves, and other musicians such as
Pharoah Sanders,
Albert Ayler, and the
New York Art Quartet. After
The Music Improvisation Company disbanded, Muir played in the band Boris with
Don Weller and Jimmy Roche (both later of jazz-rock band Major Surgery) and put in a stint with Afro-rock band
Assagai in which he met
Canterbury scene keyboard player
Alan Gowen. Muir and Gowen subsequently formed the experimental jazz-rock band Sunship with guitarist
Allan Holdsworth and bass player
Laurie Baker, although Muir has admitted that they "spent more time laughing than playing music" and suggests that the band played no gigs and got no further than rehearsals. with a lineup that came to be, according to Muir, focused on "group potential and creating monstrous power in music." on which he is listed as playing "Percussion and Allsorts". Several live recordings featuring Muir were released later by
DGM records; the
15-disc box set released in 2012 for the 40th anniversary of the album includes every recording from that line-up, both live or studio, documenting everything Muir has ever contributed. According to John Kelman, Muir "brought not just a visual 'X factor' to the group but a musical one as well, his not-to-be understated contributions during his brief tenure with Crimson still felt well after his departure, with the percussionist exerting a lasting influence on (drummer Bill)
Bruford". Bruford called Muir "my biggest influence and the guy who turned my head totally around ... God, did he open my eyes. Jamie saw above and beyond chops. He was into the color of the music, the tone, and being intuitive about it." Bruford also wrote that Muir taught him to "try to see life from the far side of the cymbals: drummers can be very myopic. He also pointed out – and I consider this my first and best drum lesson – that I exist to serve the music, the music does not exist to serve me." Regarding his relationship with
Robert Fripp, Muir wrote "Fripp was open and believed very much in getting disparate musical elements together ... he seemed to me to be a very good band leader. I think I was a wee bit too much for him, simply because I was so involved in improvisation. He was very much concerned with logic and function, he always worked his solos out before playing them ... For a person like him it was a very admirable creative decision to actually work with somebody like me." A little over a week after the release of ''Larks' Tongues'', Muir abruptly left King Crimson. The British press at the time cited his departure as the result of "personal injury sustained onstage during performance", a phrase attributed to the band's management company,
E.G. Records. Muir himself stated "[t]hat was nonsense about my having injured myself ... When I heard about what they'd said, I wondered why would anybody do that – what advantage could there be in not saying what actually happened?" Muir reported that he withdrew from the music business around 1990, to devote his energies to painting. ==Ideas about music==