Michael " Jakko" Jakszyk ( , born Michael Lee Curran, 8 June 1958) is an English musician, record producer, and actor. He has released several solo albums as a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He is best known as lead singer and second guitarist of King Crimson since 2013 succeeding Adrian Belew in the role. His work has been variously credited to "Jakko", "Jakko Jakszyk", and "Jakko M. Jakszyk".
Before joining King Crimson, he led bands for over thirty years, including 64 Spoons, Dizrhythmia, 21st Century Schizoid Band, Jakszyk Fripp Collins, and Rapid Eye Movement. He was a member of Level 42, the Lodge, and the Tangent and has collaborated with Tom Robinson, Peter Blegvad, Danny Thompson, Gavin Harrison, Warren Harry, Pandit Dinesh, and Dave Stewart. Jakszyk has also worked as a session musician and soundtrack producer.
Originally aiming to become a professional footballer but, after failing to win a place with the Watford Boys football squad at the age of 15, Jakszyk switched his full attention to his other two obsessions, music and acting. As a developing musician, he was inspired equally by pop, progressive rock, and jazz fusion (with artists such as Allan Holdsworth, Henry Cow, King Crimson, and Hatfield and the North being particular favourites) and developed a high level of skill as both a guitarist and singer by his mid-teens. Having joined the National Youth Theatre at 14, he maintained his acting work in parallel to his musical efforts and would eventually gain his Equity card. In 1974, at the age of 16, he was kicked out of the Jakszyk family home by Norbert, and embarked on a struggling career as part-time actor and musician while working at a number of dead-end jobs to survive financially.
Jakszyk's first significant band was 64 Spoons, which he joined as guitarist and lead singer in 1976, co-writing much of the band's material. Between 1976 and 1980, 64 Spoons wrote and performed a blend of pop, progressive rock, jazz, and comedy (typified by their single "Ladies Don't Have Willies"). Boosted by an exuberant and funny live show, 64 Spoons proved popular with audiences but failed to gain an effective record deal or media breakthrough and split up in 1980. Their only album, Landing on a Rat Column, was eventually released in 1992, many years after it was recorded. Jakszyk would describe them as "the wrong band at the wrong time".
64 Spoons's work did, however, lead to friendships with several of the musicians who had inspired the band, notably keyboard player Dave Stewart. Following the split of 64 Spoons, Jakszyk joined Stewart, Rick Biddulph, and Pip Pyle in the band Rapid Eye Movement. Jakszyk contributed several songs to the band's repertoire ("One More Time", "I'll Stand on My Own", "Ingmar Bergman on the Window Sill", "Straining Our Eyes", and "Dear Clare", the last of these a 64 Spoons song) and co-wrote material with Stewart ("This Is Not What I Want" and "'Allo Darlin' I Work on the Fair"). Between August 1980 and June 1981, Rapid Eye Movement toured Spain, France, and the UK and recorded material but split up due to Stewart's desire to concentrate on studio work (Jakszyk sang on the original version of Stewart's cover of "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?", later a hit with a new vocal track by the Zombies' lead singer Colin Blunstone).
During this period, Jakszyk also contributed to sessions for the former Van der Graaf Generator saxophonist David Jackson's album The Long Hello Vol. 3 (eventually released in 1982).
In 1983, Jakszyk signed a second solo recording contract with Stiff Records. Three further singles followed between 1983 and 1984 ("Dangerous Dreams", "I Can't Stand This Pressure", and "Who's Fooling Who") and recordings were made for a second solo album. Due for release in 1985, this album met the same fate as Silesia. It was shelved in 1985 when Stiff Records filed for bankruptcy.
Discouraged but not defeated, Jakszyk supplemented his income with acting work while continuing to pursue music. He continued his collaboration with Dave Stewart, contributing to his duo work with Barbara Gaskin and playing a prominent role on the Stewart-produced Neil's Heavy Concept Album (a 1984 spin-off from the Young Ones comedy series). During this time he also met an up-and-coming drummer named Gavin Harrison, who would become one of his most frequent collaborators. It was also during this time that he finally visited the United States to meet his birth mother.
Jakszyk's third attempt at recording a solo album, this time for MDM Records in 1986–87, was shelved when MDM's distributor, Virgin Records, dropped its support. Some of the "lost" material from this and the previously shelved albums resurfaced on Jakszyk's 1996 compilation album Are My Ears on Wrong?, while Jakszyk‘s ill-fated first album Silesia was briefly issued on CD in the late 1990s.
In 1987, Jakszyk joined Peter and Kristoffer Blegvad, John Greaves, and Anton Fier in the short-lived New York-based band the Lodge, with whom he recorded one album, The Smell of a Friend.
He formed the Kings of Oblivion with Gavin Harrison in order to record the album Big Fish Popcorn, which was released on the Bam Caruso label in 1987. The album was a pastiche project similar to XTC's the Dukes of Stratosphear that was later described as "inspiring" and "the absolute worst of Frank Zappa or Ween". Both musicians took on ridiculous pseudonyms for the project (Jakszyk as "Mario 'Fat Man' Vanzetti" and Harrison as "Helmo 'Hairdo' Hudson") and fictitious liner notes claimed that the recordings were the first and second sides of a "lost" 1967 double LP recorded in the back of an auto shop.
The Kings of Oblivion led into a more serious project when Jakszyk and Harrison teamed up with classical Indian singer/percussionist Pandit Dinesh and Danny Thompson on double bass. The quartet formed the world-fusion project Dizrhythmia, which mixed jazz, folk, art rock, and Indian classical music. Pandit Dinesh encouraged Sultan Khan to contribute to the album, while his three British colleagues brought in their own friends and colleagues from the art rock world: Dave Stewart, pedal steel guitarist B. J. Cole, and Lyndon Connah from 64 Spoons. Dizrhythmia's self-titled album was released in 1988 by Antilles Records.
Jakszyk went on to play on all of Level 42's tours and promotional appearances between 1991 and 1994. However, record company politics restricted his contributions: despite being pictured on the cover of 1991's Guaranteed, he never performed on a Level 42 studio album and was never a full member of the band. For similar reasons, material which he wrote and recorded with the band with the intention of release ended up shelved when Level 42 reunited with drummer and songwriter Phil Gould. Gould's second period with the band was short, and Jakszyk brought in Gavin Harrison as drummer to fulfil tour obligations. Jakszyk left Level 42 in 1994 when group leaders Mark King and Mike Lindup opted to split the band up. He would later play in one of the line-ups of King's solo bands.
During 1994, Jakszyk was very briefly a member of the Kinks. He performed with them on 1 January 1994 BBC Radio broadcast of The Johnnie Walker Show, substituting for estranged guitarist Dave Davies. The songs performed on the broadcast were "Phobia", "Over the Edge", "Wall of Fire" and "Till the End of the Day #2".
In 1995, Jakszyk released a solo album, Mustard Gas and Roses, on Resurgence, featuring a mixture of sharp, intelligent pop songs and progressive/art rock instrumentals. The album featured further contributions from Karn and Jansen, as well as from Sam Brown, BJ Cole and Jakko's Dizrhythmia colleagues Danny Thompson and Gavin Harrison. In 1996, Resurgence released a Jakszyk compilation album called Are My Ears on Wrong? – which compiled material from Jakszyk's second and third solo albums (the ones which had been shelved by Stiff and MDM during the mid -1980s).
Since 1991, Jakszyk had been sketching out plans for an autobiographical radio piece called The Road to Ballina, a mixed music-and-spoken word project exploring his own family history and his bittersweet search for his birth mother. In 1995 this went into production. In addition to Jakszyk's own account of growing up as an adoptee, the work included extensive contributions from both of his adoptive parents relating to their often harrowing wartime experience in Europe as refugees and conscripts and as people under occupation. Several of the recordings were conceptually arranged (including specially made recordings of Norbert Jakszyk recorded in Auschwitz-Birkenau) while the music tracks featured Gavin Harrison and two of Jakszyk's former Level 42 colleagues, Mark King and Gary Barnacle.
The Road to Ballina was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 1996, and Resurgence released a shorter and compressed version on CD in early 1997. This was the first of Jakszyk's albums to be credited to "Jakko M. Jakszyk", and he would release all of his future solo work under that name.
In March 1999, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a second Jakszyk radio piece called The Church of Lanza, which used many of the same techniques as The Road to Ballina. The piece dealt with the nature of fame and celebrity, focussing on "the deification of stars who die young", and used the life of Mario Lanza as its focal point. The piece incurred the wrath of a number of outraged Mario Lanza fans and, unlike The Road to Ballina, was not released on album.
During this period, Jakszyk continued to work as a guest and collaborator. Between 1994 and 1999 he contributed to albums by Akiko Kobayashi ( Under the Monkey Puzzle Tree), Peter Blegvad ( Just Woke Up), Gavin Harrison ( Sanity & Gravity), Pip Pyle ( 7 Year Itch), Saro Cosentino ( Ones and Zeros), and Richard Barbieri (Indigo Falls).
A particularly notable Jakszyk guest effort was his contribution to Mick Karn's 1996 album The Tooth Mother. While providing guitar, keyboards and flute, he also played saxophone, shawm and the Indian bowed dilruba.
By this point, Jakszyk had spent several years assembling another solo album, which was eventually released as The Bruised Romantic Glee Club in 2006. Hailed as his most accomplished work to date, the double album featured one disc of new Jakszyk songs and one disc of his reinterpretations of works by musicians who'd influenced him (including King Crimson, Soft Machine and Henry Cow). The album included a remarkable sweep of guest performers assembled from the full length of Jakszyk's career and associations. As well as contributions from long-standing allies Lyndon Connah, Gavin Harrison and Dave Stewart, the guests included Danny Thompson and Pandit Dinesh (from Dizrhythmia); Mark and Nathan King (from Level 42); and King Crimson members Robert Fripp, Mel Collins and Ian Wallace. Hugh Hopper (Soft Machine) and Clive Brooks (Egg) also made an appearance, playing on a Soft Machine cover version initially recorded for a compilation in 2000.
Despite some highly complimentary reviews, the original 2006 release of The Bruised Romantic Glee Club was blighted by bad luck and the collapse of the record company releasing it. Eventually, the album was re-released on the King Crimson-associated record label Panegyric in 2009 (alongside a companion album of material recorded at the same time called Waves Sweep the Sand).
In 2007, Jakszyk joined British progressive rock band the Tangent for their album Not as Good as the Book (released 2008). Following one guest appearance and one full live show at the Summers End festival in September 2008, he resigned from the band.
Initially Fripp downplayed these suggestions. In an online diary entry, he described the trio as an endeavour which "has the Crimson gene, but is not quite KC. It is a Crimson ProjeKct, although this was not the intention. Given the gene pool, I suppose this counts as evolution. If JFC were named as a ProjeKct, which would be legitimate IMO, then all manner of expectations, categorisations, limitations & dopey commentaries would be launched to deter the ears of innocent audients". Fripp went on to comment that the origin of the trio was in fact a proposed but abandoned ProjeKct Seven (featuring himself, Jakszyk, Collins, Levin, Harrison and possibly some other players) and described the forthcoming A Scarcity of Miracles as "one of my favouritist albums, of those where I am a determining element". A Scarcity of Miracles was met with a good critical response and a mixed welcome from the King Crimson fanbase. Due to Fripp's retirement from live performance, the release was not supported by a concert tour. Fripp's formal retirement from the music industry in 2012 stifled most of the remaining rumours.
On 24 September 2013, Fripp made the announcement that he was launching a new line-up of King Crimson, with its first tour planned for September 2014. Shortly afterwards the personnel list was announced, with Jakszyk confirmed as lead singer and second guitarist. The new King Crimson line-up continued and expanded the Scarcity of Miracles project personnel: other members besides Fripp and Jakszyk were Mel Collins, three members from the 2009 Crimson band (Gavin Harrison, Tony Levin and Pat Mastelotto) and another new recruit, American drummer/keyboard player Bill Rieflin (with a second drummer/keyboard player, Jeremy Stacey, also being added to the band in 2016). Jakko remained with King Crimson until the band's retirement in 2021 as a key part of the band's longest continual line-up.
In September Jakszyk was awarded the 'Chris Squire Virtuoso award' at the 2017 Progressive Music Awards at Shakespeare's Globe in London. It was presented to him by comedian and actor Ade Edmondson.
In 2023 and 2024 Jakszyk performed live in Italy with the new John Greaves Band along with Mel Collins, Annie Barbazza, Annie Whitehead and french drummer Régïs Boulard.
His album Son of Glen was ranked by Goldmine as one of the 11 top prog albums of 2025.
In the BBC TV movie In Dreams (starring Lenny Henry and Bill Paterson), Jakszyk makes a cameo appearance as Michael Jackson's recording engineer. He has also appeared in the BBC sitcom Birds of a Feather.
Under the pseudonym of "Grand Master Jellytot", Jakszyk produced the novelty hip-hop single "The Stutter Rap" (performed by "Morris Minor and the Majors", who included future comic star Tony Hawks). This record reached Number 4 on the UK singles chart in January 1988.
In 2025, Jakszyk backed up Thomas Dolby toward the end of his US tour.
| 1982 | Jakko | Silesia | Chiswick (deleted prior to general release with some copies available in Europe; briefly available in 1990s as reissue; reissued as download in 2009) |
| 1987 | The Lodge | Smell of a Friend | Antilles Records, (reissued by Resurgence, 1997) |
| 1987 | The Kings of Oblivion | Big Fish Popcorn | Bam Caruso |
| 1988 | Dizrhythmia | Dizrhythmia | Antilles New Directions/Island Records (reissued by Resurgence, 1997) |
| 1990 | Tom Robinson/Jakko M. Jakszyk | We Never Had It So Good | Musidisc (later reissued with four extra tracks as Blood Brother, Castaway Northwest, 1997) |
| 1991 | 64 Spoons | Landing on a Rat Column | Freshly Cut Records (recorded 1978–1980) |
| 1994 | Jakko | Mustard Gas and Roses | Resurgence |
| 1995 | Are My Ears on Wrong? | Resurgence (compilation of tracks from two unreleased post- Silesia solo albums) | |
| 1997 | Jakko M. Jakszyk | The Road to Ballina | Resurgence |
| 2002 | 21st Century Schizoid Band | Official Bootleg V.1 | self-released |
| 2003 | Live in Japan (CD & DVD) | Iceni | |
| 2003 | Live in Italy | Arcàngelo | |
| 2006 | Pictures of a City – Live in New York | Iceni | |
| 2006 | Jakko M. Jakszyk | The Bruised Romantic Glee Club | Iceni, ICNCD (reissued on Panegyric, 2009) |
| 2008 | The Tangent | Not as Good as the Book | Inside Out Music |
| 2009 | Jakko M. Jakszyk | Waves Sweep the Sand | self-released |
| 2011 | Jakszyk, Fripp & Collins | A Scarcity of Miracles – A King Crimson ProjeKct | Panegyric |
| 2014 | King Crimson | The Elements of King Crimson 2014 Box | DGM |
| 2015 | Live at the Orpheum | ||
| The Elements of King Crimson 2015 Box | |||
| 2016 | Live in Toronto November 2015 | ||
| Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind | |||
| The Elements of King Crimson 2016 Box | |||
| Dizrhythmia | Dizrhythmia Too | Dizzy Rhythm | |
| 2017 | King Crimson | The Elements of King Crimson 2017 Box | DGM |
| Live in Chicago | |||
| 2018 | Live in Vienna | ||
| The Elements of King Crimson 2018 Box | |||
| Audio Diary 2014-2017 | |||
| 2019 | KC50 | ||
| The Elements of King Crimson 2019 Box | |||
| Audio Diary 2014-2018 | |||
| 2020 | Jakko M. Jakszyk | Secrets & Lies | InsideOut Music |
| 2025 | Jakko M. Jakszyk | Son of Glen | InsideOut Music |
| 1982 | Jakko | "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" / "Something Tells Me" (with David Jackson) | Silesia |
| "Straining Our Eyes" / "Fall to Pieces" (with David Jackson) | |||
| "Grab What You Can (Biez Co Mozesz)" / "Tell Me" / "Would I Be the Same" / "I'd Never Have Known" (with David Jackson) "Grab What You Can" / "I'd Never Have Known" (Chiswick Records) | |||
| 1983 | "Dangerous Dreams" / "Opening Doors" (with David Jackson, Stiff Records) | Are My Ears on Wrong? | |
| 1984 | "I Can't Stand This Pressure" / "Living on the Edge" (with David Jackson) "I Can't Stand This Pressure" / "Living on the Edge" / "Cover Up" (with David Jackson) | ||
| "Who's Fooling Who" / "A Grown Man Immersed in Tin-Tin" (with David Jackson, Stiff) | |||
| 1986 | "Judy Get Down" / "This Old Man" | Are My Ears on Wrong? | |
| "Learning to Cry" | Mustard Gas and Roses | ||
| 1990 | Tom Robinson/Jakko M. Jakszyk | "Blood Brother" | We Never Had It So Good |
| 1994 | Jakko M. Jakszyk | Kingdom of Dust | |
| 2006 | "Highgate Hill" | The Bruised Romantic Glee Club | |
| 2011 | Jakszyk, Fripp, and Collins | "A Scarcity of Miracles (Radio Edit)" | A Scarcity of Miracles |
| 2015 | King Crimson | Cyclops | |
| 2017 | Heroes | ||
| 2018 | Uncertain Times | ||
| 2020 | Jakko M. Jakszkyk | "The Trouble with Angels" | Secrets & Lies |
| "It Would All Make Sense" | |||
| "Uncertain Times" |
| 2014 | Emerson, Lake & Palmer | Brain Salad Surgery (Deluxe Edition) |
| 2015 | Emerson, Lake & Palmer | Trilogy (Deluxe Edition) |
| Jethro Tull | Minstrel in the Gallery (40th Anniversary La Grande Edition), Live at The Palais Des Sports, Paris, 5 July 1975 | |
| King Crimson | Thrak (40th Anniversary Edition) & THRAK BOX | |
| 2018 | Chris Squire | Fish Out of Water (Deluxe Edition) |
| Jethro Tull | Heavy Horses (40th Anniversary New Shoes Edition), Live in Concert in Berne, Switzerland, May 1978 |
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