King Crimson Discography MCP Server

日本語版: README.ja.md

An MCP server that surfaces King Crimson record and live-performance data — including a curated incarnation (line-up era) model that shows how each song belongs to specific eras of the band.

What makes this different

Generic MusicBrainz/Discogs MCP servers can already fetch releases, credits, and pressings. This server does that too, but adds two things a band-agnostic discography tool structurally can't have:

• A cross-source integration layer keyed on MBID. MusicBrainz, Discogs, Cover Art Archive, and setlist.fm are stitched together so one release-group MBID gets you credits, physical editions, artwork, and live history without re-resolving identities per source.

• A King Crimson incarnation model. King Crimson's line-up turned over almost completely, many times, over five decades — the same song can mean a totally different band depending on the year. This server hand-curates eight line-up eras and cross-references every tracked song's live-performance history against them:

  Song	Incarnations it appears in
  "21st Century Schizoid Man"	Spread across every era — the band's signature
  "Starless"	Only the Larks' Tongues era and the Three-drummer era
  "Elephant Talk"	Born in the Discipline era, gone by the Three-drummer era

• A local, offline-first concert cache. Full concert history (1,200+ shows) is fetched once via refresh_setlist_cache and cached as JSON. Every subsequent song/tour/era query reads the cache — instant, and immune to setlist.fm's intermittent rate-limit failures during analysis.

• Reverse lookup: song → the live albums that captured it, by era. Ask "which live releases contain Red?" and get them grouped by incarnation. It cross-references two things this server already knows — when a song was played (from the setlist cache) and when each official live album was recorded (parsed from its title) — so it answers a question neither MusicBrainz nor Discogs answers directly.

  For Red, this surfaces 37 single-show live albums across the Discipline, THRAK, ProjeKcts and Three-drummer eras — and correctly shows none from the 1974 line-up that recorded it, which never played it live (numbers as of this writing; MusicBrainz's catalog can grow).

Tools

The incarnation model

Eight line-up eras, split on membership changes:

Boundaries are dates, not just years — 1972 in particular splits into the Islands-era "Earthbound" spring tour (Transitional) and the Wetton-era autumn tour (Larks' Tongues), since the band's membership genuinely changed mid-year.

Line-up eras are a matter of fan interpretation, and this is one reasonable cut, not the only one. The full definition lives in KING_CRIMSON_INCARNATIONS in src/king_crimson_mcp/server.py — edit it (members, key releases, date boundaries) to match your own view; the aggregation logic doesn't need to change.

Song → releases (reverse lookup)

"Which releases have Red on them?" is answered in two complementary ways, because King Crimson's live catalog splits cleanly into single-show albums and multi-show compilations.

Single-show live albums, mapped to eras — song_live_releases

Needs two local caches, built once:

1. refresh_setlist_cache — every show and what was played (already covered above).
2. refresh_live_releases_cache — King Crimson's official live releases from MusicBrainz, with a recording date parsed out of each title where possible.

Both are one-time builds: the band's history is fixed, so neither cache needs to be rebuilt unless you want to pick up new MusicBrainz entries.

How it works: a song's performance dates come from the setlist cache; each live release carries a recording date parsed from its title (e.g. "Live in Toronto – June 24, 1974"). Where a release's recording date matches a date the song was played, that release is taken to contain the song. This is a straightforward, transparent rule — reliable for single-show live albums.

Known limits (by design): King Crimson has about 187 official live releases, of which only about 87 (as of this writing) have a title MusicBrainz-parseable into a full recording date — that's the range song_live_releases can match with confidence. The other ~100 (box sets, compilations, titles without a date) can't be matched this way; song_live_releases reports exactly how many were skipped in its coverage field rather than silently under-reporting. Excerpt compilations are an edge case too: a song played at a show can, in principle, be matched to that show's release even if the specific release is a highlights disc that omits the track — date-matching can't distinguish "recorded that night" from "included on the disc."

Box sets & compilations, listed — song_box_sets

The multi-show box sets and compilations that song_live_releases can't date-match are covered here, from Discogs. It filters King Crimson's Discogs releases to compilations and box sets (format contains "Comp" or "Box" — which excludes single-show downloads) and lists the ones whose tracklist contains the song: title, year, format, Discogs link, and how many times the song appears on each.

Why no era grouping here: Discogs doesn't structure per-track recording dates, so a box set can't be split into eras the way single-show albums can. song_box_sets therefore lists the box sets containing a song rather than classifying them — era-level precision is song_live_releases's job. Together they cover both halves of the question.

Needs its own one-time cache: run refresh_box_sets_cache (about a minute; ~38 box sets/compilations from Discogs, as of this writing). Requires DISCOGS_TOKEN.

For Red, song_box_sets returns 14 box sets/compilations (the "Collectors' King Crimson" volumes, "1972–1974", the "2015 Japan Tour Box", …), while song_live_releases handles the single-show side.

The honesty of both tools' coverage reporting is the point: results are exactly as complete as the underlying data lets them be, and you (or the calling agent) can see where to dig further instead of getting a silently incomplete answer.

Quick start

Three one-time steps, then it runs inside Claude.

Step 1 — Install uv (one time)

uv is a small tool that can fetch and run this server for you.

• macOS / Linux:
  Terminal

  Copy

  curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
  

• Windows (PowerShell):
  powershell

  Copy

  powershell -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"
  

Close and reopen your terminal afterward. To check it worked:

uv --version

Step 2 — Get your free API keys

This server reads public music databases. Two of them need a free key:

• setlist.fm (live performance history) — apply for a key at https://api.setlist.fm/docs/1.0/index.html
• Discogs (physical editions) — create a token at Discogs → Settings → Developers → Generate token

You also set a contact email (MCP_CONTACT) — MusicBrainz requires this so their servers know who's calling. Any email you own is fine.

(MusicBrainz and Cover Art Archive need no key.)

Step 3 — Add it to Claude Desktop

Open Claude Desktop's config file:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json