Derek Bailey. Aida. Incus, 1988.
---. Lace. Eminem, 1989.
---. Music and Dance. Revenant, 1996.
---. Playbacks. Bingo, 1998.
Does it make any sense to discuss the guitarist Derek Bailey in relation to popular music? Since the most likely answer to the question is "who?," that would seem to settle it. Here's a musician whose best-selling CD on Amazon.com (which only carries a small sample of his total discography) is ranked at 38,454--and most of the others are nowhere near that high.
No, Derek Bailey has never become popular, which is not to say he has no relation to that category. In many ways, an overview of his career shows an ongoing engagement with the whole idea of "the popular," quite directly early in his career, more obliquely at other times. Despite the relative obscurity of his music, the conventions and concerns of more popular forms of music have never left Bailey's interests.
Bailey's been committed to playing his style of music for over 35 years, with back catalog of at least 100 releases. According to The Rough Guide to Jazz, he even once had a Grammy nomination in the early '80s (The Grammys were unavailable for comment). He's written a book on the nature of improvisation as practiced in a wide range of world music, and he hosted a BBC series on the topic. At 71, he continues to play concerts throughout Europe and America. But describing this "style of music" is no easy thing.
Say What?: Towards a Definition
Perhaps it just has to be called "free improvisation." Some call it free jazz, and it would most likely be found in the jazz section of a music store, but it's really not anything in the Louis Armstrong vein. Bailey suggested to John Corbett1 just calling it just plain "free," so that way the name would have 4 letters like "jazz" and "rock," but be neither. Bailey sardonically comments that "Four letter words are good for music, it seems to me, if you want to nail something onto it."
Conventional wisdom has it that free improvisation music is resolutely unpopular, the ultimate cult item that can't be "nailed." It's generally seen as having emerged out of the later efforts of John Coltrane, taking up his impassioned, energetic approach to improvisation and completely severing any lingering connection to chord structures and song forms. As a result, most jazz fans don't even see any remaining relation to jazz; certainly it was passed over in Ken Burns' lengthy documentary on the subject. Critics claim that without any apparent ongoing connection to either jazz or popular (rock) forms, free improvisation wound up in an aesthetic dead end, a victim of its own anarchy. Thus, conventional wisdom has it.
Although detractors might see free improvisation as a dead end, limiting free improvisation's origins to its jazz roots misses other important influences. Its beginnings are also certainly linked to the energies associated with rock music in the early and mid-sixties--a time now safely enshrined in Cleveland, making the original threat of musical chaos it posed to some seem quaint. At the same time, free improvisers were often aware of the avant-garde classical practices of John Cage and others, such as the use of indeterminate scores and instruments treated in innovative ways. Free improvisation could move forward, avoiding the dead end, because of the many opportunities for cross-fertilization to continually renew it. Free improvisation readily adapts to new influences, such as more recently incorporating the latest digital technology like samplers and rhythm machines.
This ongoing growth can be seen in the fact free improvisation is actually continuing quite strongly. While in the United States the music mostly is confined to places like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, there's a vast array of festivals throughout the rest of the world and a steady stream of CD releases from its practitioners. (For an extensive catalogue of these ongoing efforts by Bailey and nearly 100 other musicians, see Pete Stubley's European Free Improvisation site, which is updated monthly with the latest releases.2)
Although he's mostly unknown to the commercial music world, Derek Bailey would have to be considered immensely popular when measured within this field. The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD goes as far as to consider him "a figure of immeasurable importance in contemporary music." At the same time, they also point to why he remains unknown to most listeners when they admit his "music resists exact description and evaluation." That's hardly our goal here, but perhaps some adjectives will suffice. Bailey's technique and sound has been described as "spidery" and 'pointillistic," as well as "Webernian," "a furious hardscrabble" and even as an "example of [Karlheinz] Stockhausen's concept of moment form." Of course, for the first time listener, it probably sounds mostly like a squirrel trapped inside a guitar, scraping at the strings to get out--although one fond of ringing harmonics.
Another problem in finding an audience for this music is that it's utterly without repertoire. There are no "favorites" to be played; as the name implies, freely improvised music is always a response to the moment. In Bailey's case, there's an endless exploration of timbres, fingering and plucking techniques, and even playing with amp volume via a pedal control. In short, Bailey is concerned with exploring the elements of the guitar that are usually regarded as "pre-set" for most performers and which make up a recognizable style. Christoph Cox, writing in the British music magazine The Wire, characterizes Bailey's style in this way: "The guitarist plays his instrument like a found object, treating it as through it lacked any previous history and had simply descended from the sky. With all the intensity of a child playing or an expert tinkering, [Bailey] reveals a relentless exploration of the instrument's possibility."
Lots and Lots of CDs No One Listens To
In recent years, the discography of Derek Bailey has expanded greatly: one discography lists 16 releases in 2001 of new material, reissues, and one-off contributions, with 5 more in the pipeline due before year's end. Although Bailey's idiosyncratic style is readily recognizable, where it will be found is not. While the majority of his recordings are either solo or duets with others in the free improvisation scene, he's also recorded with the popular jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, a drum-n-bass DJ, a group consisting only of four (!) double basses, the funk rhythm section of Ornette Coleman's Prime Time group, and a Japanese hard rock outfit. Not to mention an album entirely made up of feedback (on both electric and acoustic guitars), duets with a Chinese pipa player (a kind of lute), and duets with a tap dancer named Will Gaines.
Bailey's also released over a dozen solo performances, but even within that setting, a wide range of styles come into play--at least it might seem so. These aren't styles Bailey "tries on" like a new jacket, but rather moments where, however briefly, he seems to enter familiar territory. About the CD Aida, Christoph Cox comments, "To the listener straining for points of reference, slices of Japanese koto, punk rock, Country blues, flamenco, and folk guitar might seem to surface momentarily only to dissolve again, as Bailey draws his lines of escape from all habit, cliché, and resolution."
Although a listener might strain to make these jumps, the effort shouldn't be so unpleasant--it falls into the "missing the forest for the trees" category, by scrambling to tack on a label before coming to terms with it on its own. Improvisation, whatever the genre or setting, might be seen as a sort of Ur-music experience. After all, Bailey points out, the first music produced anywhere in the world would necessarily have to be improvised, a raw musical impulse that precedes the later development of conventions and genres. Bailey's music hints at the roots of these genres without ever really entering them.
That such a range of styles seem to come into play won't seem surprising to the reader of Bailey's book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music
3. There Bailey's range of interest is reflected in his interviews with musicians about the role of improvisation not only in free improvisation, but in straight jazz, Indian classical music, rock, flamenco, baroque and classical church organ music. Throughout these forms, the question isn't where room is made for improvisation, but how improvisation serves as a kind of common thread that runs right through the fabric of all these musical dialects.
Of course, with this range of interests as well as musical settings in which Bailey plays, the catalogue of his releases is nearly unmanageable. Thus the listener is confronted not only with the difficulty of grasping his style, but more concretely, the simple problem of locating his CDs. Few of Bailey's releases will be found in American stores, but instead have to be mail ordered, as they're mostly found on smaller European labels, including Incus, the label Bailey runs himself. In fact, Bailey's most recent 14 releases appear on 10 different labels--and to make matters even more complicated, he's begun releasing home-recorded CD-Rs.
A Completely Irrelevant Historical Aside
For all the difficulty Bailey's music poses for contemporary listeners, it's surprising to realize just how thoroughly rooted he was in popular forms. He studied guitar under several jazz and classical guitar teachers for more than a decade and worked extensively in the '50s and early '60s in all sorts of popular and jazz settings: clubs, concert halls, dance halls, radio, TV, and recording studios. His work included gigs in the bands for Shirley Bassey (of "Theme to Goldfinger" fame) and for the first London appearance of the Supremes. He also worked in the pit band for Morecambe and Wise, one of Britain's most popular comedy acts. So despite what a cynic might claim, Bailey's later work in the avant-garde can in no way be linked to a lack of more traditional success.
Instead, Bailey was drawn away from these comfortable gigs to the more challenging experiments of the day. Bailey, along with drummer Tony Oxley and bassist Gavin Bryars (now a noted classical composer), formed Joseph Holbrooke, a group that evolved over 1963-66 period. They began by exploring the modal jazz pioneered by Miles Davis, carried on through the even more open forms initiated by John Coltrane, and eventually found themselves playing what's now called "free." This was a group named after an English classical composer who, although very prolific and somewhat noted in his lifetime, had become completely ignored at the time of his death. Bailey, in Improvisation, notes that there were conflicting dates for Holbrooke's birth and death, and because of his prodigious output of music, some speculation existed that more than one person published under that name. Based on that bit of mystery and uncertainty, the group felt that name was "a good cover for our activities."
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The performances with Joseph Holbrooke were largely confined to lunchtime gigs at a pub in Sheffield, but that lurch away from mainstream popularity hardly seemed a loss. In an interview with musician and journalist David Toop, Bailey expressed a certain disgust with some of his days of performing in mainstream settings, admitting, "I've played the most appalling shit in front of huge audiences and they're really enthusiastic." However, he doesn't claim that popular music itself was the problem, but rather the fact that working professionals in that field were able to get by on tricks of audience manipulation or just coasting through familiar routines rather than giving an engaged performance. This is something Joseph Holbrooke sought to avoid.
So You Don't Want to be a Rock and Roll Star?
Of course, at the time Bailey was opting out of the world of popular commercial music, another option had become available. But despite the changes rock and roll music offered in terms of energy, style and audience, if anything Bailey saw it as a step backwards. In his view, the importance albums and especially hit singles (played repeatedly at home or on the radio) held for the rock and roll audience made a massive difference compared to the music listened to by the people who had previously frequented the dance halls.
In the dance hall setting, the popular music dance hall musicians played may have served as a kind of "wallpaper," but the audience "didn't expect to be completely familiar with it," which allowed a certain degree of freedom. Bailey told John Corbett, "you might be playing all kinds of rubbish, but it was your rubbish to some degree. You weren't being asked to play other people's rubbish." However, in the era that boomed around the rock and roll hit single, "Everything you played had to be totally familiar to the people not listening to it, if you see what I mean. You're still wallpaper, but you had to be exactly the kind of wallpaper with which these people surrounded themselves at home."
At first glance, the explosion of rock and roll had seemed to offer a cure to the stale professionalism a working guitarist might face. The groundwork for the image of the Guitar Hero had been laid by Chuck Berry's duck walk, Bo Diddley's gunslinger act with his squared-off guitar, and even Elvis' casual use of the guitar as prop. And then, by the time the Joseph Holbrooke explorations were underway, a whole new range of styles came into play, leading to Pete Townshend's acrobatics, Jimmy Page's (and Nigel Tufnel's) use of a violin bow, and Jimi Hendrix' voodoo sexualization of the instrument. Everyone seemed to conduct experiments in the use of feedback, and other techniques that aimed at redefining the nature of the guitar. Certainly this offered another alternative to life in a pit band?
Yet ultimately these experiments with technique often remained only ornamental ways of still playing familiar blues changes and the like. For Bailey, working with what is often ruled out as mistakes (buzzes, scratches, strangled notes) is central to avoiding the "wallpaper" trap and allowed him to go outside conventional styles. Besides, as Bailey told John Corbett, all it really meant was that as a rock player, "you had to stand up all the fucking time." This isn't just the objection of a chairbound dancehall player, but an objection to a whole new type of ritual that would further obscure actual playing that's "free."
On this, Bailey seems to have had a point. Guitars will always have some role in popular music forms like pop, metal, and rock. Madonna even still thought it worthwhile to learn a few chords so she could strap one on (a guitar, that is) in her 2001 tour. However, the notion of the Guitar Hero as popular phenomenon seems to have had its last gasp with the "hair bands" of the '80s, reduced to what Frank Zappa described in this easy formula: go "weedly-weedly-wee, make a face, hold your guitar like it's your weenie, point it heavenward, and look like you're really doing something."
The problem for Bailey isn't the stylistic differences between rock, dancehall, etc. For his, they all come down to the same thing: they've already been "composed," with only a little room for improvisation. Even the lengthy solos of a Guitar Hero happen in prescribed spaces against known chord changes. Bailey instead points out the importance of "that flip definition of the difference between improvisation and composition: improvisation is not knowing what it is until you do it, composition is not doing it until you know what it is."
And Rock has always known "what it was," sometimes coming down to just three chords and an attitude. It was a kind of formula meant to be repeated endlessly, ecstatically. But for all the energy and feeling of freedom rock music could offer in its simplicity, its joy always seemed endangered through repetition. This often found its way into the music through the trope of the grind of the studio and the road alike. It's even there in an early form in the 1957 Elvis Presley film Jailhouse Rock. Perhaps the Who put it most succinctly in "Success Story," where the singer finds himself, "Back in the studio to make our latest Number One,/ Take Two Hundred and Seventy Six, you know this used to be fun?", and the liberating anarchy and violence of Townshend's guitar abuse is reduced to a business plan: "I may go far/ If I smash my guitar."
I Said, Say What?
So if it's not rock or jazz, what is it? Indeed, as Bailey's comment suggests, saying "what" seems to be the problem. For instance, none of what's been said here so far gets at actual performance. So some examples. One of Bailey's more unusual recordings is Music and Dance, a 1980 performance reissued in 1996 on Revenant. The sound quality is rather poor, recorded not in a studio but in an old disused forge in Paris, a large room with a glass roof. Bailey's guitar accompanies Min Tanaka, a Japanese Butoh dancer. Butoh is itself a kind of "free improvisation" approach to dance, and Tanaka performs naked. So along with Bailey's tangle of notes, the slapping of Tanaka's body can be heard as he roams the room, doing whatever it is he's doing. Bailey too seems to walk about, judging from how he fades in and out of the mix. At first, this seems like just a bad bootleg recording, but it becomes clear that more is being captured than just some guitar sounds.
Eventually, a percussive sound begins to build until it becomes a complete roar: a rainstorm has begun pelting the glass roof. And it's clear Bailey is accompanying that as well, until the downpour briefly reaches the point where everything is drowned out. This is not a performance that any microphone could reproduce, but rather a whole environment has come into "play."
Which perhaps comes back to the enormity of Bailey's discography. It's not that he has that much to say, not that there's so many original songs springing from his fingers to be exactly catalogued. What's heard here instead is interaction--with a place, a body, another instrument, and an audience--and of course with himself. Such interaction is always specific to a time and place, and ultimately the attempt to reproduce it through recording is impossible. Which would seem to demand no recording at all. Or, perhaps instead, the path of over-recording, of creating a discography that's diary-like in assembling the details of continuous yet wildly divergent interactions. It's been said that after hearing a Derek Bailey recording, you're either not interested in hearing any more, or you want to hear it all. Which is, of course, nearly impossible…
Or even desirable, perhaps, this attempt at completism. Something much more basic is at work in this music that allows a listener to dive in anywhere. In an interview with David Toop, Bailey put it quite simply: the music that interests him "depends on good will, curiosity and adventurousness. That seems to be so rare in music that it's almost illegal. What are we talking about? We're not talking about bloody insurance here." (And let's hope this article doesn't sound like insurance talk. Bailey would probably disapprove, since as he once said in an interview with Jean Martin: "But should musicians be talking about this sort of thing? Doesn't it damage our anti-intellectual credentials? Noch ein grosses. Grunt.")
"George"
Perhaps three last little grunts?
- On the 1998 CD Playbacks, a number of musicians sent Bailey prerecorded tracks for him to improvise on or around. Most were percussion and rhythm-oriented, although a different angle was offered by John Oswald, the composer associated with "Plunderphonics," which simply put is the art of sampling taken to an artistic extreme. Oswald offered a cut-up or collage version of previous Bailey recordings. At times his track seems fuguelike, taking fragments and repeating them in loops that recombine with each other into a Grand Bailey Orchestra.
Bailey didn't improvise to Oswald's offering. He let it stand by itself, since "He's effected such an improvement on how my stuff usually sounds, I thought it better to leave it alone."
- On the track "George," also from Playbacks, Bailey makes only a spoken contribution over the playing of Jim O'Rourke and Loren Mazzacane Conners. In it, he slowly purrs: "The guitar--the electric guitar--a lover's instrument…." Very romantic, Derek. Although he then rambles on in a quite funny way about his ongoing obsession with the name "George," which he then bestows on every one and thing he loves.
- And on the 1989 CD Lace, another live solo performance, the audience applauds at the end of his performance, expecting an encore. Bailey asks, "which bit would you like again?"
1There's a long interview with Bailey and some recommended recordings in Corbett's Extended Play: Sounding Off From John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Duke UP, 1994).
2 The information on Derek Bailey here goes far beyond a simple discography--it also includes a sessionography, upcoming gigs and releases, interviews, a short bio, and even sound and video clips.
3 Bailey's book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Da Capo Press, 1992) was originally published in 1980, but it was extensively revised when he was preparing a series of television programs on the topic for the BBC.
4 Bailey's humor tends to be quite sardonic, but it also seems key to understanding his approach to music. For a collection of quotations that attempts to capture both his humor and aesthetic (all taken from his book Improvisation), go to The Derek Bailey Remix Project.
