Derek Bailey is a guitarist, a guitarist’s guitarist, a guitar fetishist’s ultimate guitarist, a player whose playing proceeds from his instrument in a way that hasn’t been done with such unswerving devotion since Hendrix amazed London by sleeping with his instrument. As the record industry desperately seeks to manufacture ‘personalities’ who can hold consumers’ attention for the time required to make a purchase, Derek Bailey remains there, just as John Lee Hooker remained there: one man hunched over his guitar, more important and more spine-tingling than a thousand processed and packaged stars – or a thousand books of post-rock theory telling you that sampled and remixed old records are the dawning of a new era. A sinister alliance between the corporate drive to sell hi-tech equipment and the ‘anti-elitism’ of radical cultural theory declares that instrumental skill is irrelevant to the production of music. Bailey, on the other hand, makes everything hang on split-second decisions about fingers and strings. Although Bailey has evolved a personal language beyond the parameters of any known technique, his playing is all about what dexterity and imagination can achieve – without software and hardware props. Yet what he plays is more consistently surprising than anything constructed on a computer: it happens in real time. Those who model cultural life on private property relations will decry Bailey’s ‘difficult’ art as elitist, the preserve of the supermusical; those who understand culture as interaction, provocation, and consciousness expansion hail Bailey as the best stimulant going. Here’s stuff you can learn volumes from (and his gigs are some of the cheapest in town).
If you’re serious about the guitar, you’ll get to Derek Bailey eventually, and what you will learn will shatter your world picture, and cause you to reconsider every fact about twentieth-century music – and artistic meaning, and politics, and class society, and the concept of the ‘good album’ – you ever thought you knew. Bailey places the guitar at the centre of his aesthetic. In fact, he places it above aesthetics! He said the following to his biographer, but he could have said these words to anyone who expressed an interest in his music.
I would think one of the problems you might have with what I do is that I would claim to be a guitar player, that’s what I do. I’m not an artist. The art market has never appealed to me. Playing an instrument creatively – improvising – will include art, I suppose, but it goes well beyond the boundaries of art in many ways. And, in particular, the guitar is such a universal instrument. It’s found in almost all areas of music. Most instruments are tied to one or two musics. The outstanding example is the saxophone, of course. Though sax players have struggled valiantly in recent years [laughs] to shed – or at least not to be associated with – jazz, it’s always reclaimed them. The guitar is the universal instrument, it seems to me – the only instrument which comes anywhere near it is the drum. [8–ix–97]
Derek Bailey is a guitarist, but he’s also an avant-garde extremist, a theorist, an enragé and a cunning saboteur of overground values. When Charles Saatchi’s ‘Sensation’ was exported to Berlin, a concert by Bailey was included in the programme as if he were an integral element of glossy, TV-friendly, ‘shocking’ late-nineties Brit Art. The publicists who wrote the brochure cannot have known that Derek Bailey’s art is too hard and jagged and underground for the limelight-hogging Brit Art celebrities. In terms of commitment, involvement, experience and thought, his art simply asks too much. And, unlike the seventies ‘experimental composers’ (sometime followers of Cornelius Cardew’s revolutionary critique) who now adopt the role – and lucrative commissions – of the bourgeois composer, Derek Bailey has adumbrated a genuine counter-theory: Improvisation.
Nothing, Bailey argues, is quite as interesting as improvisation, and nothing is quite as dull and boring and dead as knowing precisely what is going to happen – whether that is listening to computerised electronica, watching a rock group thunder through their set, or hearing a symphony orchestra saw through some genius’s opus. Musicians who specialise in creating something new in real time cut through manipulation and the star system – all the bullshit produced by arts administrators and the music industry – and speak to an audience of peers. If free improvisors are dissed by the general public, by the businesses that service that general public’s alienation and inertia, by journalists with stakes in the star system, this merely proves how right they are.
Jazz and rock fans sit around and dream about righteous beboppers at Minton’s Playhouse on 118th Street, or seeing the John Coltrane Quartet in the flesh, or standing with Andy Warhol to watch the Velvet Underground at Café Bizarre in 1965, or of pogoing to the Sex Pistols at the Roxy – but they’re just victims of the corporate labels that buy up and market the archive. Real life happens now, in the teeth of public disapprobation. You can find it if you’ve got the guts to forget celebrity fixation and spectacular daydreams and confront with sober senses the actual reality and the aural possibilities of your own miserable life. It’s a movement! It’s an ethos. Unlike rock and punk and drum’n’bass, it can’t be bought and sold by capitalism, it can’t be ripped off by A&R sharks or managed by managers. It doesn’t deal in the coin of wishes and images. It’s music. It’s called Free Improvisation.
Derek’s arguments can certainly be upsetting. Your own precious ‘radicalism’ is under permanent attack. On occasions, the debate has nearly reduced me to tears when trying to defend the things I love – Thelonious Monk or Frank Zappa, for example – against his strictures, his insistence that composition always limps behind the creative musician. But even an organ as devoted to the recorded commodity as Record Collector couldn’t deny that Bailey’s commitment to improvisation keeps allowing the man to cut record after record of provocative, challenging, high-grade, densely packed, infinitely rewarding, always-happening music: the most eventful back catalogue since Charlie Parker, and the most arresting, icepick-in-the-forehead guitar notes since Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson. Bailey professes disinterest in records and incomprehension of record listening as a pastime, but his name on a CD is one of the most dependable indications of a worthwhile purchase. For people who’ve taught themselves music by acquiring records, that is one hell of a tip for hallowed status.
A sane person – or anyone with a regard for the canon of music outside Bailey’s active orbit – cannot credit his polemic completely (quite), but you can’t deny that it works for him. And the insistence on freedom, the challenge to live in the here and now – instead of relying on treasure hoards of certified culture (whether that’s a shelf of Beethoven scores, or of 12-inch white-labels) – throws the hapless fan into the whorls of difficult philosophy. Freedom, time, contingency, necessity, action, mind, matter, ego, id … all one’s concepts are busted on the rim of Bailey’s musical event horizon, the insistence that musicians can collect together and attempt to play the never-before-heard, and that this step into Nothing is better than ‘having a good time’. Free Improvisation is the unalloyed humming dynamo of creativity, the essence of the Hip everyone’s looking for, the Holy Grail MacGuffin Poodle Duende Absolute. It’s the ineffable spice of life capitalism turns into something you have to buy. No mystery, folks: it’s human labour, human activity – maybe it could actually be us!
For those too young to have experienced the cultural tumult of the sixties, Free Improvisation is a thread of gold spun from the happenings and situations that rocked that period. It’s the one art practice that has managed to preserve that revolt as activity and experience rather than image. It lacks the tedious ‘irony’ that collusion with art-gallery and music-industry alienation inevitably entails. Of course, if a record or a performance concentrates an entire philosophy of opposition to today’s society into a running time of forty minutes or an hour, it’s hardly going to be easy to assimilate. As much as it changes music, revolutionary art expects you to change. People who are happy with the way things circulate in this society – those at the top of the heap – aren’t going to welcome an experience that tilts assumptions about what constitutes communication and cultural value. Radical? Free Improvisation will give you radical!
Free Improvisation demands that the listener acknowledge all the possibilities of modern music denied by a hierarchical, commodity-based, fool-the-punter system. People who run that system – those employed by record labels and distributors, radio DJs, pop pundits, pop academics, newspaper critics – will decry what they hear as charlatanry and put-on. That’s because the procedures of Free Improvisation threaten their livelihoods and demand a completely different way of doing things. In his obituary of bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa, Bailey pointed out that anyone who has experienced the music business from the musician’s point of view is bound to be cynical ‘about music and often, in fact, about everything. To talk about any musical activity and not be cynical is usually to open the door to bullshit.’ However, Bailey’s particular cynicism is closer to the barking-mad ‘Who’s-impressed-with-kings?’ of Diogenes than it is to the smug and facile cynicism of those who operate the mass media.
In 1937, in order to denounce the evils of Modern Art, the Nazis staged an exhibition in Munich called ‘Entartete Kunst’ (Degenerate Art). As a prime example of modernism’s Jewish–Bolshevik degeneracy, they displayed a critic’s appreciation of dadaist Kurt Schwitters on a panel on the wall:
Merz drawings by Kurt Schwitters? Merz poems by Kurt Schwitters? Both meaningless. Printed words in lines of different lengths, and those are supposed to be poems. Words stamped all over the notepaper and childish drawings of coffee grinders, houses, and wheels, and those are supposed to be drawings. Damned if I can make head or tail of them. One goes like this:
Umdumm.
So hear glands scream tormented Morea
Wawall squeal unlarned you self sing
Shrill blazing glands equalk being
Like axletrees screaming scream
Blaze toremented bodyhot unlarned gleam
Oh Hear! Eh unlarned tormented torment
Hey you Sibaylie splats the moon
Oh see oh sing along
The dragonfly golds Gloyteyah
But toorment dream chokes off my sing.
Now if anyone asks me what all this is supposed to mean I can only laugh in his face, along with the poet and painter himself. Art is not there to be ‘understood’, Merz poems are not for professors of philology. Dada – yes, Dada – is there for joining in, for laughing at yourself and the world at large, for being a happy dope. If you don’t feel it, you won’t ever get it. To think that someone has the courage to kid around in art! A slap in the face to meaning and gravity! To Kurt Schwitters – many thanks. [Paul F. Schmidt, review exhibited at ‘Entartete Kunst’, 1937]
‘Hey you Sibaylie splats the moon’!! With this line, Kurt Schwitters prophesied how Bailey would one day kill the bourgeois moonlight and retune all its sentimental sonatas.
The Nazis’ do-not-do-this ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition was staged alongside their this-is-how-it-should-be-done ‘Great German Art’ exhibition, replete with winsome female nudes and muscular heroes rendered in the kitsch pseudo-classical style favoured by Hitler (as usual, the Verboten proved more enticing than the Improving: two million people attended the former exhibition, a mere four hundred thousand the latter). The Nazis were so confident in their case for artistic seriousness, they assumed everyone would tut at Paul Schmidt’s levity – or at least be too intimidated to protest (the atmosphere at the ‘Degenerate Art’ show was one of pious horror – there were very few objections, and those that occurred led immediately to arrests). As we have seen in the wake of 9–11, the banning of humour is one of the great weapons of authoritarian oppression. In this sense, Derek Bailey’s art – perpetually breaking the spell of grandeur cast by so much music – is anti-Nazi music par excellence. It also hasn’t much time for art pretentiousness – or religion.
When I interviewed Derek Bailey for The Wire in 1996, he described watching TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart at work in Alabama. In particular, he objected to the musical manipulation of the congregation. Bailey’s dislike of musical sententiousness runs deep.
Great music often is funny, don’t you find? One of the strange things is that there seem to be vast swathes of music where the sense of absurdity has completely disappeared. I was watching a television programme where this guy was playing Bach on a keyboard with his head inside a brain scanner! At the same time, the guy who’s introducing the programme is standing there in a doctor’s white coat! Imagine what Morecambe and Wise could have made out of this. There was nobody cracking a laugh or anything, but this was fucking hilarious! And this happens so often in music, this posturing – you get it from rock guitar players through to fat tenors. The audience just never buckles down and pisses themselves at these characters. Sometimes it’s obvious the performer thinks it’s funny, I was watching a clip of a young Elvis Presley – to me he obviously thinks he’s being funny … apart from everything else, he is funny – but these huge swathes of music that get launched at us, there’s a complete absence of any sense of absurdity. It’s strange stuff, music, a lot of it is highly suspect, I should say. [29–v–1996]
Yet despite such statements by its foremost theorist, the image of Free Improvisation one gleans from newspapers and listings magazines is of deadly earnestness and high-minded austerity. ‘Hair-shirt improv’ is one memorable phrase. Why such misrepresentation? Because journalistic commonsense is so disciplined by class society that it can’t imagine that non-commercial or critical art might be hilarious: fun is light-headed froth manufactured for the masses, heavy-duty culture is a serious, neoreligious experience for the middle-class elite. Despite the best efforts of postmodernism, no one seems to believe that anything amusing could be historically or psychically progressive. This separation of different aspects of our potential experience into warring camps (high versus low, laughter versus learning) has diminished our capacity to understand and feel. Class society divides us, and culture itself is distorted and sectioned. Reacting against the Sturm und Drang movement of his youth, Goethe insisted that ‘cheerfulness’ was an essential component of progressive culture: that is the approach that connects Kurt Schwitters to Frank Zappa, and Frank Zappa to Derek Bailey.
How to map this fragmented and warring culture? The overview from the Olympus of academia is about as useful as a tourist’s snapshot from an aeroplane. It simply doesn’t deal with how it feels down here, or what the real tensions and conflicts are. Boosting particular genres or bands or artists – the language of the press release – doesn’t work either. Not only do such efforts reduce everything to competition (the only effective social dynamic recognised by capitalism), they make assumptions about genre that technical musical developments have already wrecked. A fragmented culture requires triangulation, a staking out from points of perception grounded in the culture’s actualities. I propose three propositions to explain why playing one genre off against another doesn’t work:
1. No one can say anything perceptive about ‘jazz’ who hasn’t understood the assaults on schooled musicianship represented by blues, punk, DJ scratching and computer techno.
2. Cyber Theory hypes digital technology, but if DJs have no idea about the reverberation of their instruments – record decks and DATs, samplers and laptops, amplifiers and speakers – in acoustic (analogue) space, that is, the space between people and the space inside your ears, they remain trapped in the paradigms of their software, and can’t make anything happen.
3. Supporters of Free Improvisation who believe that ‘pure’ music replaces the need for politics spout craven fund-me drivel.
This book attempts to speak about Free Improvisation whilst holding these three propositions in mind. It attempts to cut loose from both promotional falafel and the jargon of genius, and talk directly about aesthetic value, about the success and failure of the music as music. This won’t make the author popular amongst improvising musicians, but that is not the intent. Audiences and their thoughts and post-gig discussions need to be addressed: that’s the culture this book seeks to contribute to.
To abandon the covert authoritarianism of categories like ‘good musicianship’ and ‘fine playing’ is risky. Judgements become concrete, partisan, ideological. You’re attacked for ‘bringing politics into music’. Accounts of gigs that seek to uncover motivations, inspirations and animosities invite the put-down ‘you don’t know what you’re fucking talking about, you weren’t playing’. Of course, that’s true – but if that really is the attitude, why do musicians bother to play in public at all? We leave critics who make sure they can never be proved wrong to their tight-fisted righteousness. If no one’ll say what they think is happening at these rare points of heat in a lukewarm culture, then we may as well all pack up and go home, certain that no one can communicate with anyone else in the modern world (because that’s what capitalist business-as-usual would rather we did).
Derek Bailey’s philosophy of Free Improvisation is fully in line with that of Heraclitus – you can’t step into the same river twice. The water changes, you change, everything changes. The first take is the best because it’s unique, and all imitations are ghastly. The real world is concrete, ever-changing and specific, irreducible to fixed concepts and eternal laws. For Bailey, music is a tissue of concrete utterances, irreducible to scores and systems: Free Improvisation is thus militantly dialectical. It confounds bourgeois assumptions about music being a matter of scores and records, fixities derived from the world of property relations and promising profits to those with capital to invest. In a commercial music-world aswim with talk of ‘crossing boundaries’, Free Improvisation is the real thing: when an ensemble plays the music properly, the individual musicians can’t even tell who played what. Improvisation challenges all proprietary limits. In short, anyone who talks about music today and ignores Free Improvisation is drivelling over a corpse.
To get a grip on Free Improvisation, music criticism needs a science of the sign, a revolutionary theory. Anything tainted by existentialism, structuralism or post-structuralism will not suffice. All that Parisian nonsense was a product of the failure of 1968: neo-Kantian despair, pseudo-radical Nietzschean sentimentality. We need the theory that emerged in Russia in the 1920s.
The old bourgeois linguistics, commanding an already-established object of investigation – the Indo-European languages of the historical epochs – and taking its departure, moreover, almost exclusively from the petrified forms of written languages (dead languages foremost among them) can’t say anything about speech in general, its origins or purpose. The greatest obstacle in our way is not the difficulty of research nor the lack of solid data, but our scientific thinking, which is locked into the traditional outlook of philology or ‘cultural history’, and has not been nurtured by analysis of living speech in its limitlessly free and creative ebb and flow. [Valentin Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 72]
If critics and musicologists put Free Improvisation into focus, what they say about music in general – including that heard via records and the radio – might start to make sense!
However, though I believe that Bailey’s position is ultimately compatible with my own Musical Marxism (a confluence of punk, Zappa and Adorno), I don’t expect to hear him say so. Theory and abstraction are immediately suspicious to Bailey: they freeze the moment, generalise the instant, abuse the actuality, bully the musician. Thus far, it does seem that theory hasn’t helped improvising musicians much. The literature is littered with statements and papers which in retrospect merely seem to echo the intellectual fads of the day. Of course, I believe this book is of a different calibre. Refusing to pitch my drift towards the seminars of academia, I imagine the scorn of the creative musician burn into the back of my neck as I type each sentence. This tension makes this book an unstable composite of opposites.
Introductions are written to forestall criticism, or at least the more gruesomely predictable examples, so let it be stated upfront that Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation is DESIGNED to be contradictory, argumentative and unfinished – in short, improvised and dialectical. Author and subject haven’t reached agreement about anything, especially about Free Improvisation – either as method, scene, or all-embracing philosophy (a point made repeatedly in the text, though this will of course not deter the stupid from pointing it out). Bailey is a musician, interested in opportunities for playing which engage and challenge him. As he put it to me in an interview for The Wire, criticism is anathema to him (‘I’m not here to slag off people who might give me a gig or something like that’). Watson is a listener, seeking to understand what repels and attracts him, to relate musical experience to philosophical and political tenets and issues. Hence criticism – news of who’s worth paying to see and who is not – is crucial. Bailey plays gigs and makes records. Watson writes about them. Indeed, in opposition to the cosy collusion of the conventional biography, this glowering gap between author and subject is here proposed as a field of play for the imaginative and thoughtful reader (those who’d prefer to read Bailey’s uncontaminated opinions should turn to his excellent book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, published in 1980, and reissued with new material in 1993).
If I’ve made mistakes in assessing gigs or CDs, I hope those involved will inform me – publicly – so we can bring the light of reason and the sweetness of truth to bear on these fascinatingly complex, ambiguous, inspiring events that happen under the name of Free Improvisation. The process is not going to be easy, but Derek Bailey deserves no less.
Out To Lunch
Somers Town
1 April 2004