In Memoriam Derek Bailey
Since you read this post, you must have made it to 2006 alive. If you need an excuse to celebrate and get wasted, there you have it. Unfortunately, Derek Bailey cannot share the fun anymore, the free improvising British guitar god died on December 25, 2005, at the age of 75. Starting out in conventional dance hall and jazz bands, he increasingly shed all conventions and invented his very own approach to guitar playing and improvising. Though he often played with jazz musicians, he did not like that label and prefered to call his music “non-idiomatic”. His influence on free improvisers, avantgarde musicians and especially guitarists is undeniable and lasting. Bailey did to jazz and improvisation what John Cage did to modern classical music, in a sense obliterating the traditional concepts, destroying conventional form and breaking down boundaries to all other forms of music and noise. Apart from that he ranks with Joseph Spence and John Fahey among the 20th century guitar innovators who will be long remembered. On the practical side, in 1970 Derek Bailey founded the Incus record label with fellow free improvisers Tony Oxley and Evan Parker.
Now I can’t resist listing some of my favorite guitarists who have been influenced by Derek Bailey. Check out their recordings, you can’t listen to Ted Nugent all your life: Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, Eugene Chadbourne, Henry Kaiser, Keiji Haino, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Marc Ribot, Nels Cline, Sonny Sharrock, Alan Licht, Andy Moor, Fred Frith and Tetuzi Akiyama. Disclaimer: The selection is subjective, incomplete, and in totally random order. Not all artists listed have explicitly claimed to be influenced by Bailey.
After all these exhilarating links, I have two mp3 files of very different Derek Bailey duets. The first one is the first track of a live recording from 1983 with legendary jazz saxophonist Steve Lacy in a small club in Paris, France. It was released in 2000 under the name Outcome on the French Potlatch label. No traditional jazz, no formulaic free jazz noodling, just a freely improvised dialogue of two excellent musicians who know how to listen and respond to each other. The second track is a more distant collaboration taken from Thurston Moore’s Roots album on lo recordings. Thurston recorded one-minute guitar pieces and sent them out to lots of musicians and visual artists who edited them and sent them back. And yes, you guessed right, one of the musicians was Derek Bailey and the result can be heard here.