At home in Hackney on Tuesday, 10 November 1998, Derek Bailey was subjected to an ‘Invisible Jukebox’ for the music magazine The Wire. He was played various tracks blind – on the portable cassette player in his kitchen – and was asked to voice his responses. For reasons of space, his words needed to be trimmed for publication. Here is the unexpurgated version of an interview that caused much astonishment and hilarity when it was published in December 1998. Further thoughts on music and politics may be found on the website of Ben Watson and Esther Leslie, Militant Esthetix <www.militantesthetix.co.uk>.
MICHAEL FINNISSY
‘Come Beat the Drums and Sound the Fifes’ from English Country-Tunes (Etcetera)
[almost straightaway] Does it carry on like this all the way through? So we’ve heard it, right? A bit louder, a bit faster …
It’s only four minutes long.
Who is it? I think I ought to explain something about my relationship with recorded music. I think of this as ‘highly performed’. It’s fine for me, I like it, who am I to complain about anything like this? It’s very performed, it’s specific, they know exactly what they’re doing and they knew what they were doing I think before they did it.
What instrument is it?
I thought there were two instruments, so I assume it’s a piano, I thought maybe two pianos, or a guy playing … anyway, I don’t want to display my ignorance completely.
That’s the idea! Speculate about what it is.
It’s a piano. It’s a guy playing a piano or maybe a woman playing the piano.
You reckon it’s prepared?
Not the piano – in the Cageian sense – but in the performance I think they knew exactly what they were going to do before they did it. That’s one of the differences, isn’t it, between what I do and this. I would say it’s a piece.
Not someone like Cecil Taylor, then?
I don’t think it’s Cecil [laughs] – I’m sure it’s not Cecil! Why don’t we establish a modus operandi for this, I’d like an opportunity to rework some of this, I mean our conversation. Do I get to see it before publication?
Well, I don’t normally agree to that, but with you …
I feel fairly exposed. I never voluntarily listen to records. This reminds me of one of those flip definitions of the difference between improvisation and composition, which is – and this is where I’ll need to rework, I might have forgotten it – ‘With composition, you know what you do before you do it and with improvisation you don’t know what you’re doing until you’ve done it.’ That’s not quite right, that’s why I asked for the facility of reworking, it’s much better than that, when I first thought of using that it was much better. I always find the second time around – talking’s like playing – the second time around, forget it – regurgitate it. I thought it was a fucking beautiful piece – what else is there?
He’s using pedal-depressed resonance quite interestingly.
I like it, nice nice nice, wonderful. But… [piece finishes]
Michael Finnissy is the composer. I wish I’d brought the score to show you. It’s extraordinary.
You should have brought the score instead of the thing. The score’s the thing, the interesting bit.
Finnissy does improvise to get ideas, but then he writes down every note. Ian Pace who plays it spends hours studying each bar to get the irrational rhythms right.
I think the lad did very well, but it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to change anything once it was off. That was maybe the main characteristic of the piece, like so many pieces.
It’s the climax of a suite, the great explosion at the end.
Yes. But what you played me – you get what you’ve got, as it were. You start with it and if you like the taste of it you can carry on with it and if you don’t you may as well stop. It’s not going to get any different. Mind you, I suppose you can say that about pretty much most music, but it’s specific to composed things. It reflects a definite intention and it’s not open to negotiation.
But that’s true as soon as anything is recorded. We can’t affect an improvisation once we’re listening to it back.
This is the problem for me about recordings. There’s a lot of things about records I don’t like. Virtually everything about recording I do like. I like doing it. I like the social side. I like studios – it makes an interesting contrast. The last two days, for example, I spent one day in concert and one day in the studio. The two situations provide a totally different ambience – if I can use that word – in which to improvise, even though it’s with the same person. Completely different feeling, it’s nice, the only problem is that it produces an end result, a record. Recording’s fine if it wasn’t for fucking records. Personally, the way I would like to work isn’t possible because there’s no appropriate technology.
You’d like to do broadcasts from the studio rather than make a record, in fact? I noticed when I brought some poets in to perform at the old Resonance FM they performed differently from in front of live audiences. They were really keyed up, but it wasn’t a recording session.
It’s not to do with that, that makes it interesting. The problem with records … I’m just speaking personally, I don’t mean as a general problem. Nobody has problems with records, people love records! The whole of people’s listening lives is built around records if I understand it right. But it’s all endgame – it introduces the endgame to something that is for me primarily not about endgames. It collects it and says that’s the end of that. And there is no end as far as I’m concerned.
You might get the odd musical idea off a record, some rhythm …
I get more than the odd idea, I get my entire living from them. I’m being unreasonable about this wonderful thing, and let’s face it, recording and records are wonderful pieces of technology. Imagine, we’re listening to this piece of music. The ingenuity and the invention and the development that’s gone into the material, into the technology so that we can listen to it – usually the music on the record is nothing compared to the actual vehicle. So I think recording and records are wonderful. But from my point of view, it introduces an element into what I do which I don’t like. There’s no technology to handle what I want to do.
It’s a bit hard to get Michael Finnissy to come over to Hackney and play for you – it’s a useful snapshot.
I don’t listen to records voluntarily. I’d never have heard Michael Finnissy if it wasn’t for you bringing this thing here. I might have heard it on the radio. Radio’s better for me. Most of the recordings I hear in fact are on the radio. I don’t buy records.
Imagine this is Radio Wire then …
This house is full of records, but they’re all Incus records – [plugging-his-label voice] Incus, 14 Down Road, London, E5 8DS records. I can’t remember the last time I bought a record.
I’m aware of all these facts, but that’s not really helping me get you to talk about some music other than your own.
Ah, no.
You’re like someone who keeps noticing the marks on a windowpane – when I’m trying to make you look through it.
I don’t like that analogy.
What you’re saying now you could say about every one of the tracks I’m going to play you – ‘it’s a record, I don’t buy records’ – but what I’m interested in is the differences between them. For example, how do you think this compares? I think it’s a development of a tune that’s pretty well known …
CONLON NANCARROW
‘Study for Player Piano No. 42’ from Studies for Player Piano Vol. V (Wergo)
This gets more and more embarrassing. I don’t know what the fucking tune is!
Don’t you think it’s like that Bach tune that goes [sings] ‘dah-doo dah-dah-diddle-derr-derr-derr’?
Is it? I probably don’t know the Bach tune.
It doesn’t say it is in the sleeve note, it just reminds me of it.
It doesn’t mean anything to me – except it’s another fucking piano. What is this? A furniture demonstration?
So how do you think this is being produced?
This is nice. I think they’re all nice. I thought the Michael Finnissy piece was absolutely wonderful. This also is absolutely wonderful. You’re not going to get me to publicly criticise anybody, I’m not into that game. The whole culture of listening to records I don’t understand. Where do you look? Do you stare at the wall when you listen to records? How do you listen to records? I know what you do as a critic – you start writing as soon as the bloody record’s on, so you’ve got something to do, but what about us?
I’ve spent years playing records to people, talking about them …
So what do you do when you put the record on? I notice that you start talking as soon as the record’s on. I’m listening to it and you’re asking me questions [untrue – Derek himself started talking over both records straightaway]. Normally, what do record buyers do? Do they buy the record, take it home, put it on and for the next … I mean, they can last for 74 minutes! Do they sit there for 74 minutes, they don’t do the dishes, just sit and look at something, or close their eyes …
Make cups of tea …
So you don’t have to give it your complete, full, unadulterated attention?
That’s one of the things that’s wrong. If when you play the record, both as somebody involved in improvisation and as somebody who runs a record company, if you could only play a record once, imagine the intensity you’d have to bring into the listening. Like, if I play something I can only play it once. There might be a great similarity between each time I play, but I cannot repeat what I play. If you could only listen to it once, don’t you think it might concentrate the eardrums?
That’s what I do if I’m reviewing a record.
You’re a professional listener.
I didn’t used to do that. I used to bung things on and have them around for a long time. That’s before I’d acquired lots of records.
The point of a record is that you can play it again. That’s what the word means. It’s a record, you’ve got the thing forever, you can play it a million times, what do you need to listen to it closely for? Stick it on again. It’ll all eventually become mood music, right? Anyway, this is absolutely wonderful, and there’s just one of them doing this, it’s amazing isn’t it.
Do you think it’s improvised or composed?
I think there’s some improvisation involved in it. Unless it’s some taping, overdubbing – it sounds like some overdubbing to me, but as I say, if we could come to some agreement where I exposed my ignorance as little as possible I’d be very pleased about that. Anyway, I get the impression there’s either two people or there’s been some overdubbing.
It’s player piano.
One of the reasons I’d like to do a revision of this is to ramble on about things – which you could always take out. When I was a kid my mother always had a piano. She’d often change them. At one time she bought this huge player piano, big iron frame, great sound. Coming with it were a bundle of rolls, I can remember for years behind one of the easy chairs in the front room there were these long boxes. I used to play these things and pedal them, but I got bored with it so I’d put holes in them, make things. A lot of things were programmatic – there’d be the Battle of Waterloo, Chinese classical music. All these things generally speaking were incredibly active, but also martial in some ways. They were programmatic – realist music. I found that by just sticking little holes in the thing at random, it was amazing – it let a bit of air in. I did that with lots of them, my mother didn’t care because she only played the piano anyway, nobody used these rolls except me. The rolls just came as a bonus, she just liked the sound of the piano because it had a big iron frame, it was a monster thing. Player pianos are intriguing things.
This is Conlon Nancarrow, recordings made possible by Henry Kaiser …
That’s very nice that piece, when you consider how it’s made. Listening to the opening, I wouldn’t have thought it was a player piano, but subsequently it becomes fairly clear.
It’s got a pretty tinny sound.
It’s funny how they often have that. I wonder if it’s because they don’t use the whole set of strings or something. My mother’s didn’t used to sound the same when you actually played it. We’ve done two now haven’t we …
Yes, I think we’ve got a few quotable things – do you know the format in The Wire?
Yes. The thing I’m mainly bothered about is the photograph. This guy came and photographed me, and he had this Cyclops thing, look down there and look up at me, it made me think of Robert Newton in Treasure Island [shuts one eye]: ‘Aye, Jim Lad …’
NEW DIRECTION 1970
featuring the guitar of Masayuki Takayanagi ‘Intermittent’ from Call In Question (PSF)
[Derek listens to more than thirty seconds of the track before speaking; finally …] You see, with this there is no reason to stop listening to it. You know what I was saying about the first one, you kind of know what’s going on and what’s going to go on, here you don’t – the story’s unfolding, right? But of course it’s improvised. I can listen to this and enjoy it. What else do you want me to say about it?
Things like what instruments you can hear, date, how it feels to you …
I’ve no idea about date, that doesn’t mean anything to me.
What the background of the musicians sounds like to you perhaps, how they play.
I would guess they’re American because they don’t have any imperative to put in a bit of urgency just to prove that they’re something or other. Europeans don’t like playing as relaxed as this, it’s like they’ve got to have their balls on show within the first few seconds of time, particularly in recent years I have to say. I like it very much of course, but I like it all. We could listen to this all afternoon. I don’t understand why people don’t find improvised music totally riveting to listen to. And I mean, good or bad, if it’s honest improvised music and it’s not programmed to prove some kind of point, because all kinds of shit goes on in improvised music as in any music. If there are guys playing together and reacting to the kind of stimuli which they’re providing for each other in the way that you do when you play together – I don’t understand why people have a problem listening to it. I’ve never understood that. I don’t ever expect to know why, but I don’t understand it. I suppose it doesn’t supply them with what they’re looking for in music. It doesn’t make their arse shake and it doesn’t make your eye wet – necessarily. It might do, but it’s not about providing that kind of thing. I suppose it’s the absence of those things normally looked for in music that makes it so unpopular. It seems to me eminently listenable. Eminently listenable music. I said to somebody recently that they should try this shit in elevators. He said, I’d be really interested to play a record of yours in an elevator and gradually introduce it in one of those elevators that goes from ground floor to the 88th floor – and you can’t get out until the 88th floor – and I’d love to make a film of the people as they come out of the elevator! Which I took to be a veiled insult. I was saying, but imagine you’ve got to pass a bit of time, it’d be nice to play this in a railway station. It’s just something to listen to instead of being reminded of something. Even at this point I don’t know what’s going to happen next with this music. There’s obviously a kind of vein to it, a feel to it, but the detail is not established by details that have gone before. It’s truly developmental in that sense, these people are playing and they’re not so bothered about what happened earlier on. I haven’t the faintest idea who it is. I played recently with – with great pleasure, I have to say – with Susie Ibarra and the drumming here [Toyozumi Yoshisaburo] reminds me slightly of Susie.
I was thinking of playing you a David Ware track with her on it.
I’ve never heard David Ware. That kind of drumming is free playing out of early free jazz drumming it seems to me, lovely playing.
There’s a new instrument that’ll be coming in.
Will that be that sustain thing that was in earlier? The guitar? [listens, then smiles at some of Takagi Mototeru’s sax squeals]
What’s funny?
I was thinking to myself that you can always rely on saxophone players! [laughs]
Because he’s showing us his balls?
Not necessarily that. There’s a role for them.
They’re the singer.
Sort of – at some point they have to step out front, don’t they? Generally speaking and roughly – and you can overdo this I know, and it has been dreadfully overdone in the past – there is some generally adopted collective aesthetic or ethic in free improvisation, which saxophone players feel at liberty to discard whenever the urgency grabs them.
What did you think of Eugene Chadbourne’s statement [The Wire 177] that he likes people ‘stepping out and taking solos’, that Free Improvisation sometimes downplays that?
Yes, well … Eugene … you can’t rely on Eugene, can you? [laughs] I don’t know, I think I’m attracted to that kind of music where when you’re playing it – I don’t know what people listen for – where you can hardly tell who’s you and who’s somebody else. It might have got rarer and it’s probably got more unpopular. There is a tendency with most players as they get – let’s say – ‘more experienced’, to feel that their qualities shouldn’t be buried in all this jumble going on in the backrground, and we all perhaps ‘step out’ more than we would have done at earlier stages. I have to say I like that incoherence – indecipherable rubbish that scrambles around – I love that shit. There have been very few saxophone players in my experience who’ve actually been able to accept that non-solo role. Let’s face it, if you go out and buy a saxophone, you don’t do it to be just one of the run-of-the-mill. I think nowadays – I’m hardly a young man – saxophonists think of themselves as soloists. Fifty years ago they would not necessarily think that.
They’d be playing in big-band reed sections.
Yes. No other instrument carries the baggage – I wish I hadn’t got onto saxophones, I’m afraid – or at least such a weighty baggage as the saxophone. In jazz it’s the solo instrument and that’s it, you’re stuck with it. People don’t go out and buy saxophones in order to play brass band music.
A friend [Kitty Rees] who came to hear you play with Robyn Schulkowsky on Monday night, thought you were referring to heavy metal when you got loud on the guitar. I said, well Derek has played with this rock band called The Ruins, but I don’t think he plays tongue-in-cheek stuff …
I’ve come to like certain electric treatments of the guitar, come to find things in it I didn’t previously find. It’s more resourceful than I might have thought – bit and pieces, harmonics, what’s in it and what’s not in it, what you can get out of it. It’s not a stylistic adjustment. Some guy came here a couple of weeks ago and said, Do you think you play rock now because you didn’t play it years ago?
It’s a fair enough question.
But I don’t play fucking rock. Then again, he was a free-music/jazz critic, so he didn’t know anything about rock. Naturally he thought that if anybody played louder than the saxophone you’re playing rock. Loud guitars play rock as far as he was concerned. [track finishes] So who was that then?
It was a band called New Direction 1970 with Masayuki Takayanagi on guitar, Takagi Mototeru on saxophone, Toyozumi Yoshisaburo on drums and Motoharu Yoshizawa on bass. I’m not as relativist as you – I think really good improv records are rare, something to shout about.
I didn’t say all improv records are good – it’s great to play, perhaps. I never heard this before. It’s nice. Takagi, the saxophonist, I saw him recently. He became a very close follower of Steve Lacy’s, he got a soprano saxophone, I don’t think that was such a good idea. Korean guy.
It sounds like the free-jazz end of improv to me.
I think it’s got a kind of relaxation about it that is to do with early free jazz, which somehow got lost, it’s hard to find that now. That’s what I liked about Susie Ibarra, she doesn’t feel it’s necessary to keep something up, more a participant, maybe an equal participant with the others. I don’t know how she plays in Ware’s quartet; in the duo I played with her she wasn’t interested in accompaniment – you might accompany her! Working like that, the drums accept some kind of equal role, they don’t have a preordained role, they come and play with the others in the same way that the others play. Whatever they contribute is not prescribed, that’s the way I hear it. That seems to me what those early guys did. They were getting rid of the beat, weren’t they?
Okay, this one’s three minutes long and it’s very quiet.
Is it playing now? [it hasn’t started yet; Derek is in an impish humour] How about a cup of tea? It’s tiring this.
[While making the tea, Derek explains his demand for a new technology of musical distribution.]
This is the ideal. Whatever you play goes out, whatever you play – so that the whole selection procedure which if you’re doing what I do is fraught with question marks … – so you just put everything out. I play pretty much every day. Sometimes more, sometimes knock off, whatever. We’ll not worry about the technological details, I’ve got enough to worry about – just say it goes out and it can be picked up by anybody who’s sufficiently interested to want to pick it up, otherwise they can get on with something that’s more appealing to them. But when they pick it up, it passes them, but once it’s passed them, that’s it – it doesn’t come back. That is, their experience of it is the obverse of my experience of it. When they listen to it, they’d better get hold of it while it passes – it’s not recordable, it’s not savable. But if you haven’t heard it before you can hear it if you want to. At the moment I’m waiting for someone to show me how to do that.
An auto-destruct play mechanism?
No, it doesn’t destruct, it’s there forever for anyone who hasn’t heard it. Your facility to hear it is on auto-destruct! The thing itself just goes on, if somebody else wants to hear it, they can hear it.
You’d need bio-engineering for that wouldn’t you, a citizen-ident key that would match with the recording and mark the transaction as ‘done’ to make it unrepeatable?
This is old hat now isn’t it.
OK, tell me what this is.
ANTON WEBERN
‘Six Bagatelles for String Quartet’ from Werke für Streichquartett (Emerson String Quartet) (DG)
[After three bars] I think it’s beautiful.
I should have put something on here that you’d really hate.
It’s not possible. [listens to another three bars] I can’t identify these fuckers. I once did a journey across Germany in a car with two classical musicians. We were going across Germany so it’s pretty easy to pick up German music on the car radio. They were playing this stuff all the way through. As soon as any piece came up, they were right at it: ‘What is it?’ They didn’t listen to it any more than I am to this – they had to identify it, they were not satisfied if they couldn’t identify it, then they would have to wait for the announcement to find out what it was. If they didn’t announce it afterwards, it drove them mad. That identification thing is worse in the classical listening world than it is in the jazz world – there also it’s essential, identification is essential. Is that the end of it?
Pretty much, there’s a bit more.
[as it starts again] Crafty.
It’s Webern.
Yeah, it’s beautiful. I’ve heard this many times. I didn’t remember it at all.
It’s been absorbed.
What, Webern?
It’s everywhere now.
Yeah, yeah. Yes I suppose he must be one of the basic pillars of modern music, of course this is the cliché, we all know this, this is what the experts tell us. I told you I got all his works out of the library when I was living in Fulham donkey’s years ago in the sixties. I got ’em out of the library, Robert Craft’s recordings which I think were done in ’59 or something. They were thought badly of apparently, but I didn’t know that. They all fitted onto two reels of tape – less than two hours. I copied them. I used to play them over and over, listening to them. I was living in a bunch of bedsitters and the woman next to me –
This is the Rolling Stones fan, she couldn’t stand it …
She couldn’t stand it. She was a dressmaker and made clothes for groups, a complete one hundred per cent rock fan. She played stuff pretty loud, but she couldn’t bear Webern. She’d come banging on the door – take it off! I thought it was great. Intolerable, she found it intolerable.
I did think of playing you some of Adorno’s music. You know he wrote compositions? He studied with Alban Berg.
No, I didn’t know. I spoke with someone recently. He said that the problem Adorno had with jazz was that he only ever heard Germans play it. [laughs] I wondered about that. Theodor Adorno Platz [the name of a square in Frankfurt Derek was delighted to find full of winos] – you never went there?
Esther did – took photographs – the winos are still there, appear to be pissing against the wall in her photograph actually. So you knew that was composed?
The Webern?
You didn’t think it was improvised by Maarten Altena and Maurice Horsthuis?
Oh no. There’s something about it. I suppose it’s just the matter of quality. It really stands out. I was thinking the same about Albert Ayler recently. It’s a stupid thing to think and even more stupid to allow yourself to say it, but nobody plays like that any more. I put the ‘any more’ in, but it’s not necessary, just nobody plays like that. It’s just quality or ability and the same with Webern. There are millions of people doing it now, but they had a sense of risk in the music.
Ayler did some pretty terrible things, but that one on ESP, did you ever hear that? It’s called Spiritual Unity …
I might have, yeah, I think so.
With a screenprinted naked man cradling a saxophone on the cover – that’s astonishing.
I probably only ever heard one or maybe two records of Albert Ayler. I’m aware of Albert Ayler by the people who play like him. At least, I assume they do, I’m being too loose – but I just thought once when I heard a record by Albert, how much it stood out. It’s something about the risks taken, like with Webern’s music, nobody would quite do that now. It takes it further than anybody else would, even if they’re working in that vein.
Here’s another track.
AMM
‘Aria’ from Before driving to the chapel we took coffee with Rick and Jennifer Reed (Matchless)
Do you recognise this?
No. I don’t recognise any of ’em. All sound the bloody same to me.
How does this music make you feel?
Nervous. I wonder what to say. I don’t normally talk when I listen to music. [the track sounds like a whistling kettle] One of the advantages I’ve found of increasing age – it might be the only one I’ve found, there aren’t many around – is that some of the really high stuff, I don’t hear it any more. It disappears! It’s like volume. They ask me why I play so loud now. I say because I’m fucking deaf! [coughs] Who is this?
It’s AMM. The review I did of this got me into trouble with Evan [Parker]. It’s from 1996, recorded in the States.
I’m not familiar with AMM. I know Keith’s playing. I think he’s a remarkable artist. I think he’s the kind of person we should all be in a way, but AMM … I don’t know whether this was the last time I heard them, but the play that I have in memory of them, if I were to think of what AMM are, is going back a bit because [Cornelius] Cardew was playing with them. At that particular performance, Cardew seemed to provide … he was primarily there as a cello player, but he seemed to provide a number of other things that were performance-related, unless he accidentally did it – he fell over, for a start. Anyway, there was a disruptive element about what he did that seemed to me quite welcome, given the general placidity of the rest of what was going on. He provided something that I thought stood out and in a sense complemented the rest of what was going on. That was this particular performance, but I can’t remember AMM after that. I might have heard them, I just can’t remember it.
Track six, this is five minutes long.
Six? Hmmm …
SOFT MACHINE
‘Virtually Part One’ from 4 (CBS)
This reminds me – you know, I’ve spent over fifty years trying to get my guitar in tune. A large proportion of my playing has actually been tuning the guitar. I notice with other people it’s quite a difficulty. What is it?
Well, I think it’s wonderful. [laughs] But who the fuck it is, I’ve no idea, it doesn’t mean anything to me at all.
[Fishes cover out] There’s no guitar on it.
Oh. It sounded like a slightly-out-of-tune guitar to me.
It’s bass, drum, organ, sax …
There you go you see. I should’ve stayed out of this game. I can’t even recognise the absence of a guitar.
This is Soft Machine from 1970, Tony Herrington wanted me to play you some progressive rock because of the Chris Blackford versus Evan Parker debate about Improv and Prog Rock …
Well I think it’s lovely, Mr Herrington. I only heard them once, matter of fact.
You met them?
I don’t think I knew them, except I met whatnot – the drummer [snaps fingers] …
Robert Wyatt?
… Robert – met him many times. But Robert was around in all kinds of ways.
He came to gigs?
Oh, he did for years, used to come to the Unity Theatre in the seventies …
Did he play?
No, I’m not aware of that. I’ve played in concerts, something Victor Schonfield put together, where Robert played piano and sang. And I think Evan and I played a duo.
Would that be his politics – that he’d be interested in the ethic of Free Improvisation?
No idea. I don’t know what his interest is, or even if he’s interested, though I keep bumping into him. One of the connections that might explain it is Paul Haines, we’ve both worked with Paul Haines in some way or other. I think I once heard this group at Ronnie’s or something like that when I was playing there with somebody. Anyway, I would never have recognised them.
The chords are so English pastoral, so Canterbury Rock …
I’m not any more familiar with Canterbury Rock than I am with Blackpool rock – ho ho! [laughs]
Strapline for the article!
Oh fuck, sorry about all this. This goes on for a heck of a long time. How long does this one last?
It’s only five minutes.
[Reading sleeve notes as if the names are totally new to him] … Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge, Robert Wyatt on drums, and Elton Dean.
That’s a trombone isn’t it?
He’s playing alto saxophone and saxetto [he means saxello] …
What’s that? a sax with a trumpet mouthpiece or something?
Oh, Roy Babbington double bass, I know him … wait a minute – Marc Charig cornet, lots of them, lots of them, Nick Evans trombone – how did I miss all these people? – Jimmy Hastings alto flute and bass clarinet, Alan Skidmore tenor saxophone … blimey, it’s a go out there, by fuck!
Funny you should say Paul Haines – all these extra horns make it sound like Carla Bley’s Escalator over the Hill – which set Paul Haines’s lyrics … It fades here …
It fades out.
I faded it out at the start of the next track – it’s a continuous suite on the record.
Well it sounded like a masterpiece to me, not that I’d recognise a masterpiece if I drowned in one.
Are you sure? The next one is a masterpiece.
Is a masterpiece? Good. It’s about time we had one, I think. OK I didn’t say that.
JOHNNY ‘GUITAR’ WATSON
‘Three Hours Past Midnight’ from Three Hours past Midnight (Flair/Virgin America)
[After three guitar notes] That’s a masterpiece straightaway. Now that’s a guitar! I can say with absolute confidence that this is a guitar – I’d go further, it’s an electric guitar. Let’s see, it’s not Eugene! This is rather like the Webern [laughs] (these are the kind of things that are so beautiful to say aren’t they, like, ‘You can see the things this has in common with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Number …’). By fuck, where would we be without this shit?
What I like is he’s singing and playing guitar, but the guitar notes are so unruly, almost like it’s not him …
It’s fantastic actually. Buddy Guy does a little bit of this sometimes. I can imagine him coming at the guitar, looks at it and then goes – ‘right, take that!’ – it’s beautiful I think. Who is it?
Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson.
Hmm. I’ve only read about this, but I can’t imagine anyone updating this stuff, I mean a young blues player. I wonder what a young blues player can do – he can do the same thing or forget about it. I’m thinking of that as a good thing. I used to think that about jazz, if you’re born in the right place at the right time and maybe the right race, you’ve got a chance – otherwise, forget it. I know it’s not a fashionable point of view now. [listens to the solo break]
The guitar sound is very brittle.
That kind of sound has absolutely no ambiguity about what’s being played.
He’s not making it sing?
That’s right. Also, it’s so clear what he’s doing – things like the chords or when he plays two or three notes.
The pauses with time too, the jokes where he holds back the phrase …
Should you be idiot enough to want to write it down, there would be no problem writing it down, in a sense (yet you would still not have anywhere near the essence of it, of course, I’m not talking about that), but the actual physical part of the sound is so clear. He’s got no doubt about whether he’s playing what he should be playing.
He was a pianist originally.
Was he?
Turned to guitar because he wanted to show off at the front.
Didn’t we all – well that’s behind the saxophone player of course.
He invented the hundred-foot lead so he could jump into the audience still playing.
Did he? Oh beautiful. I saw old whatnot do that. You know when I did those programmes I wanted to use the blues guitar player Albert Collins, he’s dead now – I went to see him at the Camden Palace in the eighties, fronting a six-piece, very rocklike this band. John Zorn used him on something once. Albert Collins did that, spun himself out into the audience with this long wire. He had a saxophone player who was the lewdest player I’ve ever seen, he was magnificent. If he’d have got his cock out, it would have been a gesture of modesty. What he was doing with the saxophone was extraordinary. The whole thing was a terrific performance I thought. We didn’t use him because Jeremy [Marre] thought he was incoherent, I thought he was saying exactly what he wanted to say, it’s just we didn’t understand what it was. Marre wanted more of the ‘I grew up in Mississippi and my mama sent me out on the road’, the usual. I asked Collins where he lived and he said Las Vegas. I said, Why Las Vegas? And he said, B. B. King lives in Las Vegas. That was all the explanation needed! He was staying in a hotel in Holland Park, had these English girls with him, great guy.
You had Buddy Guy in those programmes didn’t you?
Yes, Buddy was great, lovely.
CAPTAIN BEEFHEART
‘One Red Rose That I Mean’ from Lick My Decals Off, Baby (Bizarre/Straight)
See what I mean about tuning? It’s a problem with the guitar. It’s a written piece isn’t it? Who is it?
It’s Bill Harkleroad – or Zoot Horn Rollo – playing a piece written for him by Captain Beefheart.
One of the problems I have listening to music – or not so much listening to music as discussing it – is the 1955/1956 break – where to you chaps there is no music before 1955 except classical music. So I think, wonder if he’s heard so-and-so? There was a kind of jazz player, a guy called George Van Eps, played seven-string guitar. He made one or two jazz records, commercial ones – guitar, bass and vibes type shit – but he had that type of solo playing off to such a degree it was …
There’s a flamenco thing in that?
Well, I suppose you could hunt all sorts of things out of it … but this self-accompaniment thing, with chords and bass, a bit of melody here and there, this guy was terrific at it. It’s one of those things you get with musicians – musos as you call them – where you think, [awed whisper] what the fuck’s going on? Like just in itself, the idea that there might be any aesthetic quality either there or sacrificed is totally beside the point, the fact that the guy can do this is like riding four horses at once.
Alan Tomlinson is like that when he’s got all his hoses out and he’s playing eighteen notes at once on his taken-apart trombone … or Fred Frith when he fills the room with his pentatonic psychedelic waves of sound.
It’s a long tradition. Fred’s one of my favourite guitar players, but in this case I’m not sure what we’re talking about is the same thing. What I’m talking about is some kind of observable skill that’s completely out of any human being’s reach. You get examples of this – or attempts at it – in solo playing in improvised music, but it goes back to music halls. I shouldn’t think anyone who’s likely to read this would know what a music hall is. When I was a kid I used to go to music hall regularly, there’d be eight or nine acts and one of them would be a novelty instrumentalist. Often they were female, a little bit overweight and virtually undressed, what little they were wearing would be star-spangled. There were two kinds of instruments. You either squeezed it – a concertina or an accordion – or you blew it – so it could be a trumpet or a saxophone, very often a saxophone actually. They’d be doing this at the same time as they’d be careering round this stage at a terrific lick on roller skates, but that was just the background to a musical performance that’d require tremendous physical dexterity. A ridiculously active piece of music, like something for pianola, a mountain of work going into this thing and meanwhile she’s shooting around, this pink flesh is flashing backwards and forwards. And she’d be playing an accordion or a saxophone with circular breathing, all kinds of lines, and shooting backwards and forwards on roller skates, absolutely essential. You had to keep moving, look kind of good and be dressed in a certain way and play this multi-multi-multi …
Would you play with Evan again if he was on roller skates?
[waves question aside] At some point you think, well this is terrific, but what is the point of all this? Because I was kind of interested in music at that age. It was only when the thing finished, and from all quarters of the house you’d get this tremendous eruption of applause, that you understood what the point was – it was about audiences. They loved this high display of skill. That seems to be a thing that’s always gone in music. Paganini used to imitate farmyard animals.
Heavy metal is where it happens with the guitar now.
In rock, but there’s all kinds of things that happen with the guitar outside all that stuff as a matter of fact. Some of the flamenco players are astonishing technical players. The dancers are the thing in flamenco too. That idea of astonishing appearance combined with some unbelievable physical act reminds me of music hall …
Is there less bullshit with that kind of show?
I think it’s all bullshit! Show business, it’s pure bullshit. It’s meaningless, it’s about applause. Can you imagine someone doing that on their own with nobody there? [laughs] They’d be locked away, confined immediately!
CHARLIE CHRISTIAN
‘Breakfast Feud’ from Charlie Christian with the Benny Goodman Sextet (CBS)
Nice, isn’t it? You know one of the old things that used to happen with discussing jazz was to guess whether it was black or white. I’d guess this is … no, I’m going to change it, it’s black …
It’s a mixture.
That’s one of the beautiful things about it, it was so difficult to tell in this period. What is it, 1930s? This is really sophisticated music – don’t you think? – particularly the piece they’re playing at the beginning. But, like, cosy at the same time, but maybe that’s just distance.
Characteristic playing from the pianist here.
Here I’m tempted to have a go at the names. Teddy Wilson?
Count Basie.
[hearing guitar break] It’s Charlie Christian, isn’t it? That puts it as early forties.
1941.
I’ve got all these recordings. Tony Mostrum – who’s a cartoonist in California and has a radio station and likes free music – sent me them on tape. [looking at record cover] These titles … one of the problems is nostalgia, things like ‘Gone with What Wind?’ and then ‘Gone with the Draft’, it’s a wartime thing. That was very much the style of the forties, like [reading sleeve] ‘Wholly Cats’, these horrible puns. ‘Gone with the Wind’ was a tune and a novel as well as the film. ‘Gone with the Draft’ is about being called up into the army; ‘Airmail Special’… ‘Solo Flight’, they’re about the air force. This was recorded 13 January 1941, recorded before America came into the war, Pearl Harbor was December that year. ‘Seven Come Eleven’ … they were so hip these titles, if you were a kid growing up and you were taken with this music, a tune title like ‘Seven Come Eleven’ was fantastic, you didn’t know what the fuck it meant.
It’s like that now with those names for hip-hop bands which sound like codes for military hardware.
Yes, same thing.
PACO PEÑA
‘Palmas y Guitarra’ from Flamenco Passion (Decca)
Did you ever see that film, by Mike Figgis, who used to be a trumpeter, Leaving Las Vegas? He made a film about flamenco, good film, got a copy of it. In fact I use it as part of my percussion bank [sets of tapes Derek uses for practising at home]. He reversed the guitar and the feet, so the loudest thing in the music, especially when there’s a vocal, is the dancing. The dancing is much louder! Percussion wise, it’s great sounds, the sound of these feet.
What I like about this CD is that as it proceeds it gets wilder and wilder and you hear more and more clapping and stamping.
They do that, make it sound as if something’s happening.
Does your very brittle sound on guitar derive from flamenco playing, that hard attack?
I like flamenco. Early this year I was in Barcelona and I know this flamenco aficionado – I said, what’s the chance of going to one of these backstreet flamenco things? Does it happen? Is it pure romanticism? Not the festival or concert-hall stuff. I said I understood that there are one or two cafés here where you can get it. He says, yes it happens, but I can’t take you. They just don’t allow strangers in.
I joined a circle like that in Madrid once, in the basement of a café at three in the morning. We all sat in a circle and clapped, there was a guitar being played but no one paid it much attention, it was the singing. People took turns – it was really emotional singing, from the throat, Arab-style. I was really shattered by the experience.
The singing’s terrific, that’s supposed to be the ultimate thing in flamenco, not the dancing or guitar playing. That was nice. Who was it?
Paco Peña, the guitarist you interviewed for your TV series. He’s playing at the Kentish Town Forum next week – I noticed a poster on the way up your street just now.
I’ve got a couple of recordings of him with that singer who died, another genius figure … oh I’m sorry I thought it was Paco de Lucia because it was so conventional, but he used to be conventional, Paco de Lucia, many years ago. This is of no interest to anybody here is it, this shit? What’s next?
It’s fun to irritate the Wire readership with unhip things.
Did you say you could pull the plug after eight? I might be listened out.
No you’re not.
FRANK ZAPPA
‘While You Were Out’ from Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar (Rykodisc)
Is this Sonny Sharrock?
No.
Why don’t I keep my mouth shut about who it is? I don’t know who it is. Who is it?
Zappa.
Oh, Zappa.
Did you think it was improvised?
Yes. As much to do with the sound as anything. At times he got a sound like that.
I’ve got a really nice tape of Sharrock in New York in August 1985 and he sounds quite Zappaesque there – kind of like Santana but with more complex harmonies … The drums are very fluid. I played a tape of you and John Stevens to Frank, so I thought I should reciprocate.
Well I’m not the kind of prick Frank was, so I’m not going to take the opportunity to throw a few gratuitous insults about. [referring to Zappa’s response to being played Derek in duet with John Stevens: ‘it sounds to me like the music I wrote for Lumpy Gravy … improvised by me with a guitar in one hand and playing drums with the other’, see my Frank Zappa: the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, p. 543] Yes, it’s OK.
He only said he thought he could play like you.
Who knows, perhaps he could do it on roller skates. These fellows are very resourceful. That interview that you were kind enough to lend me to read [Downbeat 18 May 1978] which was such a boring fucking interview, he mentioned he likes to play in ice-hockey rinks, maybe he’d like the whole band skating around, imagine that, a rock band on roller skates – has anyone done that?
Rick Wakeman did King Arthur on Ice …
That’s not quite the same thing. People have done all kinds of things on ice. [listens a while, notices some suspect intonation] As I say, I sometimes wonder if it’s completely impossible to get the guitar in tune, although Jim Hall does a very good job of it.
It’s very odd watching guitar players improvising – watching you recently I realised that they clamp their hand on some new chord with the left hand and then all they have to do is scrape across those strings with the plectrum in the right.
I know, it’s a piece of piss. Thank fuck I came across it or I’d have been reading gas meters all my life, a demanding job like that. That’s right – when I teach guitar I say, take a good firm grip with the left hand, don’t drop it, a little bit of – what do they call it? – pumping iron with the right hand.
I think you might like the next one – shall we go forward to it?
I like ’em all! I don’t know how you interpret it.
It’s damn irritating actually.
I’m not here to slag off people who might give me a gig or something like that.
The form of this was set up by Downbeat and that was when the community of New York jazz musicians was so tight that they knew immediately when they heard the record who everybody was, so when they made comments they knew exactly who they were praising or dissing – now it’s so broad a field you can’t tell.
Yeah. That’s true. I can’t tell one from the other.
CLIFFORD BROWN AND MAX ROACH
‘Gertrude’s Bounce’ from At Basin Street (EmArcy)
Is this the one I’ll like? [laughs] Is this a period piece, early-fifties white jazz?
It’s not white. In fact it was considered to be hard bop of a pretty uncompromising nature.
West Coast stuff isn’t it?
No. You told me you liked this band. I was surprised because I think you like very strict time in music and this band always struck me as rather easy and loose.
Who is it then?
It’s the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet with Sonny Rollins on sax.
Well I fucked up there. I always liked this group. I have to say – I can wriggle out of this one – I always liked it for what it stood for. I wouldn’t describe it as hard bop anyway – but I’m not sure that this kind of hair-splitting argument at this stage about fifties jazz is going to be either profitable or entertaining, but the move at this time was to hard bop which I thought was – as so often – edging downmarket in a sense, I mean aesthetically, I don’t mean marketwise, but they carried on. It doesn’t sound like bop for instance.
It hasn’t got that bebop dada.
It’s all sorted out, isn’t it? This’ll be ’55 or ’56.
Yes.
Sorted out, yes, beautiful.
This is more mature – original bebop is kind of crazy.
Looking over the precipice all the time, they don’t know quite what’s happening, or at least that’s the impression you get.
Oh all right, since you’re complaining, let’s stop.
I think the coherence is probably slipping as well.
MARTIN KLAPPER – ROGER TURNER
‘Twombly’ from Recent Croaks (Acta)
Is it George Lewis on trombone?
No.
Our next Incus record is with him, a great record, I don’t know if you’ll like it.
This is Roger Turner and Martin Klapper.
[surprised] Is it? Resourceful, these fellows, aren’t they?
Has that speed I like.
Yes, it’s nice, Roger’s very good at getting that liveliness into something that’s going on.
That’s over then.
Good.
Except we’ve got Tony Herrington’s CD to play to you, but we’ll need to find a CD player.
Well it’s not terribly reliable. Let’s go in the office. It’ll be a bit chilly.
ALEC EMPIRE
‘Stahl und Blausäure’ from The Geist Of Alec Empire (Geist)
It’s not a track off the Wire compilation is it?
No.
[Derek starts dancing like an epileptic skeleton, a danse macabre around the fetish character of the music we’re hearing; the interviewer doesn’t know whether to join in or to call the men in white coats…]
It’s like the first piece, isn’t it? Shortly after it’s started you know what the rest of it is going to be. There’s a crowd gathering outside, gyrating up and down the street. Who is this?
Alec Empire.
Oh yes. I nearly played with him once. I got a gig with a DJ in Berlin or Vienna or somehow where this kind of stuff is quite big. I was supposed to take a DJ, and I said to somebody, Listen can you suggest a DJ? I spoke to Trevor [Manwaring at Harmonia Mundi] because I wanted a DJ in Europe because the only ones I’d worked with live at that point were in the States. As it actually happened they brought one from the States because I’d worked with him before. Trevor gave me four pieces and I thought the Alec Empire piece was quite nice. I said to the people who were organising, Try to get hold of Alec Empire. He’s well known. This fucking agent rang up, so I said I’ve got to tell you I don’t have good relationships with any agents. I said, Don’t deal with me, deal with the people running this thing. He said, Alex is really busy. I said that’s all right, Tell the guy in Germany, but he had to go on about this. It turned out that you couldn’t book Alec Empire for like a year and a half – it’s like an opera singer! This was about two years ago – you’d be able to get him about now. At that time I had no idea who he was, hadn’t the faintest idea, but these guys – particularly in Germany – they work all the time. Soulslinger, this guy I did this thing with who I’d worked with in New York, he came over and did this gig. We were in Berlin. I said, Have you been in Berlin before? He said, Yeah, I come here all the time. Terrific, huge club scene. It was all right, I could get a certain amount out of it. It’s not an endless thing, but last time I worked with these pranksters I did enjoy it.
I found that a bit predictable compared to some drum’n’bass I’ve heard.
There’s no drums in it are there?
You’re saying it’s safe whiteboy music that doesn’t swing?
No. It’s like a lot of music, it’s kind of established – songs are like that. Actually songs, one of the basic musical forms, do allow for one change – they have a bit in the middle that goes somewhere else. But this kind of thing – and this dominates a lot of composition it seems to me – is about establishing something you’re going to stick with.
I like dance music, but the dance music I like is tricky to dance to. I don’t know exactly where I’m going to be putting my foot. That’s swing to me.
This piece of Alec Empire that I heard before I thought was much more interesting than that, the reason I suggested working with him. I think the stuff I liked was earlier, crude drum’n’bass – maybe when it used to be jungle. Now the technological side has maybe swamped that. They pile so much stuff on it it’s kind of become like music or something.
It’s perceived as being very radical, I think because it’s got a gritty sound to it, but actually the beat’s pretty conventional in my opinion.
I like Casey Rice. He contributed to this thing I did for Bingo [Playbacks].
I haven’t heard it.
That’s because it’s not out until January – we’ve had so many requests for it, inundated. It was a very enjoyable record to make. It’s not a drum’n’bass record, I’d say merely half the tracks were drum’n’bass. One or two of them were really very nice, or three or four, but this guy Casey Rice, Chicago electronics guy or something, a very nice track. Fast as fuck and really shifting. Funnily enough, the old jazzers reckoned that the one thing you can’t do with machines is make ’em swing, but these guys can make it swing and he does. A lot of it is just the impetus of it – things happening you couldn’t have physically done, or things people wouldn’t have attempted. It just skates them on in such a terrific rush, it’s nice to play with, certainly. Casey Rice, he’s interesting. I think some of these guys are doing something, it’s very inventive – but that track didn’t mean anything to me. Just the rhythm, the fact that it is a demanding or forceful rhythm doesn’t mean anything to me. There is plenty of it like that, I believe. The money’s good, ridiculous.
(replacement for the ‘flip definition’ of the difference between improvisation and composition on this page) Improvisation is not knowing what it is until you do it, composition is not doing it until you know what it is.
(Derek’s philosophical objection to the whole exercise:) The reason I’m unqualified for this game is that I have very little interest in the end product. My preoccupation is with the nuts and bolts, how they fit together, what it is that makes this stuff work and how sometimes it doesn’t work. In so far as I listen with interest to a record, it’s usually to figure out how it was arrived at. The musical end product is where interest starts to flag. It’s a bit like jigsaw puzzles. Emptied out of the box, there’s a heap of pieces, all shapes, sizes and colours, in themselves attractive and could add up to anything – intriguing. Figuring out how to put them together can be interesting, but what you finish up with as often as not is a picture of unsurpassed banality. Music’s like that.