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Derek Bailey

Tantris

pfm Member
I've been listening to a lot of Derek Bailey recently, from his early solo pieces Incus TAPS, duo with Han Bennink, through to a lot of his work with other groups and musicians - Cecil Taylor, Evan Parker, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and so on. Almost all of it compelling, innovative and uncompromisingly different.

The proble is that he seems to be so prolific that it's difficult to know what is really worth putting on a priority 'must listen' list. And several of his recordings seem to be out of print - Aida, for example, which I would very much like to hear.

So ... what are your top five Derek Bailey recordings, and why? And if anyone knows of a source for a copy of Aida I would be very grateful.
 
Thanks - I will make a point of looking out for that.

Off at a tangent, I have been listening to Sam Rivers' Portrait today - what a great album, with some wonderful sax and flute (to be expected), and also, perhaps unexpectedly, some superb piano playing.
 
I don't actually own 5 Derek Bailey records, but I really like the newly released one with Tony Oxley on Tzadik, came out last month and I've been playing it a lot. I have no idea if it's top 5 but it has Tony Oxley on so it has to be worth owning. Blemish crops up a lot too which I also dig, but again, I haven't heard enough of his stuff to comment on a top 5
 
A DB thread is guaranteed to bring me out of retirement.

You need Ben's book, which is the best thing ever written about free improv:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844670031/?tag=pinkfishmedia-20

You need Drops:

http://ictusrecords.com/30/covers/122.html

The only way to get it is to buy the whole Ictus 30th anniversary box, but it's all brilliant, so that's no great hardship:

http://ictusrecords.com/30/

You need all of the available Joseph Holbrooke recordings (the trio with Tony Oxley and Gavin Bryars).

You also need Derek's record with Ruins:

http://www.squidco.com/miva/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=983&Category_Code=PROG

You may not like it immediately, but you'll soon realise that's a mistake :)

You need his duo record with the dancer Min Tanaka:

http://www.forcedexposure.com/artists/bailey.min.tanaka.derek.html

You need Limescale:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/fenland_hi-brow/LIMESCALE.htm

You need his last live recording, with Bruise:

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=21482

In fact, you need everything apart from the drum n bass record. He's easily the most inventive guitarist who ever lived.

-- Ian
 
A DB thread is guaranteed to bring me out of retirement.

Excellent. Expect to see lots of ‘em.

You need Ben's book, which is the best thing ever written about free improv:

Just popped across to Amazon UK and flung a copy in my basket – I could do with getting my head around free improv a bit better and it looks like a decent read. I especially liked this snippet of a user review:

disturbedchinchilla (Amazon user) said:
Given that Improv shares some of it's fractious roots with the revolutionary socialist subcultures of the 1960's, it's hardly surprising that at times Ben Watson's book resembles a Stalinist purge. After roundly dismissing:
1)All commercial recorded music (apart from Zappa and the Sex Pistols, because he likes them)
2)Jazz (historically and culturally specific idiom - now redundant),
3)Classical music (bourgeois heritage industry),
4)John Cage (irrelevant except as a response to the bourgeois heritage industry)
5)Experimental music of Nyman, Bryars etc. (selling-out to the bourgeois heritage industry),
6)Improv as practiced by Cardewites, AMM etc., Evan Parker after he fell out with Bailey (wrong sort of Improv),
7)Recorded Improv (Bailey was famously dismissive of his own vast recorded output)
- the author leaves us with the impression that the only authentic way to appreciate music is to watch Derek Bailey himself perform live - fine, except the great man passed away last year!

Hmmm. Look forward to reading that…

Tony.

PS tragic news about Uwe Nettelbeck – news of his death in Jan only reached me fairly recently.
 
Very sad news about Uwe, but he hadn't worked with Faust for about 30 years, so they continue as before. New record out soon, produced by Steve Stapleton (Nurse With Wound). What I've heard of it is pretty great.

More Ben W fun at his website:

http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/

-- Ian
 
Ian - thanks for the recommendations which I will be following up. My only problem - apart from several of the recordings I want to listen to being OOP - is that I have so many seams to mine. There's Derek Bailey, which leads to SME, AMM, Iskra, Tony Oxley et alia, and then there's most of the FMP catalogue, and then you come across Abe Kaoru and Keiji Haino, and then a following wind leads you to Air, Michael Pilz ... the list goes on and on, and I haven't even mentioned Cecil Taylor, or Anthony Braxton, or Bill Dixon. Still, who's complaining?

I am going to have to take issue with you on Ben Watson's book. It is awful. He had such a good opportunity to write the history of free music, and decided instead to write a diatribe where his ideology crushes the subject (he makes Private Eye's Dave Spart look reasonable, goddammit!) The split with Evan Parker could have been used as a fulcrum to explore the differences in the creative impulse driving different musicians, and the real world pressures they face - Watson falls into the fatal trap of polarising the discussion, painting Bailey as the only one with integrity, and rubbishing Evan Parker. For me, this mistake kills the book - more so even that Watson's narcissism which gives the story a rather ghastly hue at times.

I have also tried Ben Heffley's Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe's Reinvention of Jazz, but this is also poor, for different reasons.
 
Watson falls into the fatal trap of polarising the discussion, painting Bailey as the only one with integrity, and rubbishing Evan Parker. For me, this mistake kills the book - more so even that Watson's narcissism which gives the story a rather ghastly hue at times.

Ben has an approach which annoys a lot of people, but he's absolutely right about the Bailey/Parker issue. Ultimately, there's a choice to be made, and Ben likes to adopt the approach of pushing things to fracture point to draw out distinctions. I often read things he's written and disagree, and then, a few months later, as I listen more, conclude he has a point. Sure, Parker's a great musician, but he's also quite compromised, and has made some very lazy choices in his time (just one example: I saw him play with Noah Howard recently, and it was terrible, fire music by numbers. He has a tendency to do that sort of thing too often). Bailey, OTOH, was hard as nails about his music, completely unbending. Not everything he did was great, but nothing he did was lazy. It's a real difference, it had a major impact on the severity of their falling-out, and the sides other musicians took over the questions it raised transcribed the later development of free music in the UK. None of which should stop anyone listening to Parker at his best.

I don't think Ben's a narcissist either, but if I didn't know him I might fall into that mistake. He's very serious about music, but he has a sense of humour (describing Parker's music as bourgeois flatus is deliberately provocative, but also very funny), and likes to mix the political, the aesthetic, and the personal in his writing. His books are full of his own life and personality, but that's because as a good Marxist he knows politics and art are inseperable from the sphere of the personal. I think he's a one-off, so much so that he seems to find it impossible to get a job writing about music anywhere in the venal UK music press nowadays, even in the supposedly hipster Wire.

-- Ian
 
Hi Ian --

We'll probably end up having to agree to disagree. I don't find the distinctions that Watson draws to be very useful - we've mentioned the Bailey / Parker split (where I think he misses a real opportunity to tell the true, unbiased history of free improvisation), but possibly more importantly I think he misunderstands the nature of music, and how it is created, in his distinction between composed and improvised music, and some of the rather crude political conclusions he then draws - which come across to me as sloganeering, rather than having real substance.

I've come across him in a different context - a silly and ill-conceived demonstration against a production of Brian Ferneyhough's Shadowtime in London. BF may be many things - at once one of the most interesting and complex composers writing today, and also very pretentious at times - but I would wager that he understands Walter Benjamin much better than Ben Watson ever will.

Anyway, I'm having too much fun exploring this music to really worry about this too much. 2 T's for a Lovely T arrived earlier this week, and deserves attention.

-- Cheers, T
 
A remarkably scary yet strangely intriguing site. I don’t know whether to eagerly anticipate or fear the Amazon delivery guy…

Tony.

(who has never managed to assign more than curiosity value to Zappa)

It's a good read, helped me understand a lot more about free improv
 
The Amazon man brought it today - looks pretty interesting. It may be a while until I get to it as I seem to have been buying books at a far higher rate than I read lately - I'm currently a quarter into Dawkin's The God Delusion with an unread pile that includes Vonnegut's last book and Tony Visconti's autobiog...

Tony.
 
I've come across him in a different context - a silly and ill-conceived demonstration against a production of Brian Ferneyhough's Shadowtime in London. BF may be many things - at once one of the most interesting and complex composers writing today, and also very pretentious at times - but I would wager that he understands Walter Benjamin much better than Ben Watson ever will.

Tantris - I thought that the demonstration against Fernyhough's Benjamin effort was absolutely justified and I only wish I'd known about it in order to join it.

For the record, Ben's partner, Esther Leslie, who initiated the demo, is a major Benjamin scholar and has spent many years studying his life and work. I am just now reading her book on Benjamin's political biography (part of Reaktion Books 'Critical Lives' series) and it is excellent. I doubt very much that fernyhough understands a fraction of what Ben and Esther do about Benjamin specifically and Marxism generally.
 
I might've missed something here (it's quite late!) but the book you should all know about and read isn't Watson's, it's Derek Bailey's!

Whilst his music might be demanding and obtuse, his writing is lucid and very informative.

Ask for it for Christmas: it's one of the best books about music I've ever read...
 
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*quite likes the Derek Bailey drum 'n' bass record*

The genre's super old hat now, but I think his heavy metal playing's quite energized by the silly idea of free improvising to a tape of a drum loop. And his fractured, stark guitar over the warm, smooth loops is just...well, nice. He was Dwayne Eddie, I suppose.

Shame he didn't live to explore improvised electronic music more; the excellent Bruise album could be filed under avant garde ambient.
 


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