Derek Bailey Music

I have never heard such tosh in all my living life ! Can't work out if the 3 tracks are actually a tune of some sort or he is still tuning up ! If you buy this album don't forget to go to the local hardware store and buy some long rope and find a tree ! Swing Swing Swing......

Yes, I am giving Mr.Bailey full marks for this one, as I would have done for much of his recorded work. Nevertheless, I must admit that my favou
rable opinion for Derek Bailey's guitar exploits, derives mainly from the fact that I myself am a guitarist and very much interested in free improvisation. As such, I find DB's playing in this CD inspired and exciting, as well as, a source of inspiration for me as an improvising musician. Indeed, I think that his solo efforts help the listener to appreciate what he does, more than some of his work with other musicians, and this is certainly one of his best. However, the imagination and creativity displayed here, is not everyone's cup of tea. Let us be honest about it: to most casual listeners, this would sound like someone fooling around with an instrument he doesn't know how to play. A guitarist of course should know very well, that it would be impossible for someone who can't handle the guitar, to do what Derek does. It takes years of effort, not to mention disregard for negative criticism, to be able to play and sound like this.
Anyway, the clarity of the two long, imaginative pieces (plus a shorter one) will be a real treat for DB's fans. As for those who are simply curious, as well as open minded, maybe this will help them to expand their ideas about what music can be.

Akis Boukalis, Athens, Greece, EU.

...at least that's what i assume the ex-gastr guys who chose this as their representation of the man would say...if you wanna hear guitar touch-harmonics and rootsy plucking, scraping, etc. made into its own language, then this is the place, methinks...oh, and when derek's watch beeps at the end of one of the pieces, hopefully you'll chuckle along with everyone who got to witness that classic moment...

If you've never heard Derek and you buy AIDA you will be changed forever by what you hear. Most guitarists can have an entire electric effects-rack and still not come up with the multitude of new and inventive sounds that Derek gets just by sitting on a stool and holding an acoustic guitar. I don't know how he does it. Derek is one of the founding father's of Free-Improvisation, and AIDA is one of his very best works. If you are a fan of music that display's pure and unadulterated creativity then you are a Derek Bailey fan in-the-making. I can't say enough about this cd. It WILL make you rethink everything you thought the acoustic guitar was capable of.

I have never heard such tosh in all my living life ! Can't work out if the 3 tracks are actually a tune of some sort or he is still tuning up ! If you buy this album don't forget to go to the local hardware store and buy some long rope and find a tree ! Swing Swing Swing......

Yes, I am giving Mr.Bailey full marks for this one, as I would have done for much of his recorded work. Nevertheless, I must admit that my favou
rable opinion for Derek Bailey's guitar exploits, derives mainly from the fact that I myself am a guitarist and very much interested in free improvisation. As such, I find DB's playing in this CD inspired and exciting, as well as, a source of inspiration for me as an improvising musician. Indeed, I think that his solo efforts help the listener to appreciate what he does, more than some of his work with other musicians, and this is certainly one of his best. However, the imagination and creativity displayed here, is not everyone's cup of tea. Let us be honest about it: to most casual listeners, this would sound like someone fooling around with an instrument he doesn't know how to play. A guitarist of course should know very well, that it would be impossible for someone who can't handle the guitar, to do what Derek does. It takes years of effort, not to mention disregard for negative criticism, to be able to play and sound like this.
Anyway, the clarity of the two long, imaginative pieces (plus a shorter one) will be a real treat for DB's fans. As for those who are simply curious, as well as open minded, maybe this will help them to expand their ideas about what music can be.

Akis Boukalis, Athens, Greece, EU.

...at least that's what i assume the ex-gastr guys who chose this as their representation of the man would say...if you wanna hear guitar touch-harmonics and rootsy plucking, scraping, etc. made into its own language, then this is the place, methinks...oh, and when derek's watch beeps at the end of one of the pieces, hopefully you'll chuckle along with everyone who got to witness that classic moment...

If you've never heard Derek and you buy AIDA you will be changed forever by what you hear. Most guitarists can have an entire electric effects-rack and still not come up with the multitude of new and inventive sounds that Derek gets just by sitting on a stool and holding an acoustic guitar. I don't know how he does it. Derek is one of the founding father's of Free-Improvisation, and AIDA is one of his very best works. If you are a fan of music that display's pure and unadulterated creativity then you are a Derek Bailey fan in-the-making. I can't say enough about this cd. It WILL make you rethink everything you thought the acoustic guitar was capable of.

Unlike the previous two reviews, I actually prefer Bailey in group improvisation that solo (except for earlier works like Pieces, etc). I think Bailey in groups suffered from what a lot of free improv/free jazz talents experience, which is a loss of something critical when committed to recording. Bailey's recordings should be approached from an experiential perspective rather than trying to read them as "works" per se (i.e. concluded improv as composition). Consequently, what I find the most rewarding about the group recordings are musicians trying to deal with Bailey. Parker's solution is to, as has been said, run circles around him--but of course Bailey could recognize this, and probably refrained even further just to frustrate Parker. I can't imagine Bailey was ever easy to work with, and thus the groups as recordings you want to revisit over and over, don't always work. Arch Duo is no exception. In Bailey, I think the deconstructive, negative-space approach sometimes wanders into just destruction. It's interesing as an historical document, but not really rewarding on repeated listen.

Bailey's record with Steve Lacy, Outcome, is perhaps the most effective of the duets, in my opinion. They break from the "duo as dialogue" idea that has become so prevalent and do something kind of new which I'm struggling to describe. Somehow they function as a unit while also reacting to themselves. Does that make sense?

Anyhow, Arch Duo can be skipped. You can probably gather all there is to know about it from the audio snippets.

This is a rather lengthy continuous improvisation from two of the most well-known and skilled British free improvisers. It's always interesting to hear Evan Parker before he began to stess circular breathing techniques as his primary mode. His lines are still longer than those of, say, Peter Brotzmann, but the shorter soprano spirals have a delightful way of doubling back as they dance about Bailey's spiky, angular instant edifices. I'll concede to the previous reviewer that Parker is playing circles around the guitarist for much of the disc, but this is characteristic of much of Bailey's "unresponsive" group playing. His frequent apparent obliviousness to other players can be chalked up to his stated preference for the unexpected quasi-Cageian juxtapositions that leaving the "jigsaw puzzle" incomplete can produce. However, there are many points on this cd where the two lock into a rapid tangle that turns into an exciting game where Bailey feints and parries while Parker uses his speed and fluidity to pre-emptively shadow the moves of one the most unpredictable improvisers of all time. Even when Bailey withdraws into disinterest, the saxophonist playfully darts about, attempting to prod him back into battle. Both players have much better cds available, but it's fascinating to hear these two pioneers going head to head before their falling out.

I actually didn't know that Bailey and Parker had played(and recorded, presumably)regularly together in the late 70's, when I picked this one up some time ago, thinking perhaps that it was a one-of-a-kind piece. Now I wish I had passed, as this collaboration just does not seem to click. I played it for my father, a relatively experimental jazz listener(the first Cecil Taylor records I heard were his), and he was helpful in pointing this out: Bailey sounds over his head with Parker; Parker is playing circles around him. One complaint about Bailey in general would be the inflexibility of his approach; for this reason, I prefer his solo work. If you are a devoted Bailey fan, this is probably for you, as Evan Parker never, in my experience, disappoints, except perhaps in some of his choices of collaborations.

One of the more unexpected and curious recordings in the catalog of Derek Bailey, "Ballads" is Derek Bailey performing a series of jazz standards on solo steel-string acoustic guitar. What's highly unusual is that it's as if Bailey decided to meet the pieces halfway, the themes are stated fairly plainly (although with Bailey's flare for harmonics, aggressive arpeggios and swipes along the strings) and serve as a springboard for a more typical "Derek Bailey style" improvisation, but what it adds to Bailey's library is something that is fairly rare in his catalog, occasions of aching beauty in the form of melancholy and longing expressed on the guitar.

The record flows from piece to piece pretty seamlessly, so much so that the transition can be unnoticable-- Bailey wraps each performance into his own style and sound with the themes floating briefly in and out of the improvised passages. Discussing individual pieces makes little sense, this is a cohesive statement.

Occasionally, I've heard this record described as accessible, this is not a sentiment I would share. This is a Derek Bailey record, have no doubt and will require someone with more adventerous tastes to be able to really appreciate it. Its accessibility comes in that the themes are ones we're all familiar with-- we all know "Stella by Starlight" and "Body and Soul". But make no mistake, it's a Derek Bailey record, and a fine one. Recommended.

I know that in this music people are dying to claim that an artist has sold out simply for trying to do something different. This record is hardly an attempt to reach a new audience, as much of it is very much what you would expect from him. However it is very interesting to hear him intertwine jazz standards with his own approach. I have nothing against jazz standards, so as a fan of all types of music I dont consider this selling out by any means. Even when he plays "straight" it still sounds like Bailey and the majority of the record is filled with the coarse harmonics, runs and pick scrapes that we cant get enough of. I like his take on the standards and the surprisingly tender moments that sometimes occur, but for fans of Bailey this is just another great record and nothing to fear.

Derek Bailey stares at the camera from the back of this album--if it weren't for the guitar you could mistake him for Samuel Beckett. A similar austerity & singlemindedness to Beckett's has always informed Bailey's music. His book on improvisation is pretty emphatic about his lack of interest in performing within preset structures. It's thus something of a mystery how John Zorn managed to get Derek to record this disc, but it turns out both to be the ultimate collector's item--any Bailey fan will probably have ordered this the moment it came out--and a surprisingly effective album.

Bailey has always peppered his solo work with fragments of jazz standards--"Stella by Starlight" on _Domestic & Public Pieces_, "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" & 1930s swing guitar on _Drop Me Off at 96th_, "Imagination" on _Fairly Early With Postscripts_. The difference between this recording & those earlier discs is that there is to my ear no irony at all here: Bailey doesn't desecrate these tunes like Eugene Chadbourne or Billy Jenkins would. But neither is it a clutch of "readings" of these tunes in the accepted jazz manner. They are instead rather like landmarks or objets trouves within an extended solo performance. Bailey doesn't do the usual head-solos-head jazz thing: most tunes are stated exactly once (& sometimes only partially), & they are enfolded in a more or less continuous 41-minute improvisation. It's hard to exactly define the relation between the tunes & the improvisations: the improvisations aren't in any sense "upon" the tunes (upon their chords or melodies), but they somehow interlock very closely--I find myself listening quite closely, never quite sure if I'm hearing bits of the standard within the abstract sections or if I'm just imagining this. Defying expectations, the whole performance lacks any sense of arbitrary style-switching or discontinuity: it works as a whole, & as such says volumes about the vexed quesiton of the relation of jazz to European free improvisation.

In short: do try. No novelty, it's actually a very fine album which provides much pleasure & food for thought. Shelve next to _string theory_, Bailey's remarkable feedback album, another recent surprise of his.

No one saw this one coming! There have been a rash of fascinating solo-guitar albums of late, from the reissue of Clarence White's practice tapes to recent improvised outings by Fred Frith and Mark Ribot. None of those, however, are as revalatory as this. Fans of improvised music have long admired, loved even, Derek Bailey for his iron-fisted resolve -- his unyeilding, resolute devotion to amelodic, arrythmic explorations and to the lack of any repertoire. While such characteristics are indeed atypical, they are hardly amusical -- he has been showing us all along that sound and music are one in the same, and that one can communicate just as effectively without limiting the language to western musical confines.

So, does this album of standard ballad faire function as an apology for decades of what some call anti-music? Hardly. What it does is illuminate, more than almost any other record of the dozens that Bailey has made, the powerful organic foundation of Bailey's concept.

Rather than a series of straight interpretations, this plays like a suite, where lengthy bouts of harmonics, squeels, and silences interact with some of the most beautiful melodies of the past 7 or so decades. It's playful, warm, cantankerous, and -- yes -- a little sentimental. It's also wonderful, an example of improvisation's power to impart personality and charisma into pre-existing structures and Bailey's own genius of reinventing himself yet always sounding like Derek Bailey. Bravo.

I know what you're thinking: Derek Bailey doing standards? Has he sold out? Actually, no. At least, these don't resemble anyone else in jazz playing standards. Take the theme from Otto Preminger's classic film noir "Laura". When Derek plays it, you can sort of recognize the theme, but only for a flash, then he's off into another world of improvisation. The only reason I didn't give this a "5" is that, let's be honest, folks, you have to be in the right mood for Mr. Bailey. His work is certainly an achievement, though.

I have owned this album for only about a week now and it is only my second exposure to Oxley (the first being Extrapolation), and as far as I know, my first exposure to the rest of the band, though I had read about and have been slightly more familiar with Evan Parker. While I do think that this album in its entirety is fantastic, Stone Garden is a particularly moving piece of music. I found Stone Garden to be the most immediately enjoyable track on the album, but as I've come to know Crossing/ Arrival and Preparation I've come to appreciate them on the same level, though musically I do think Stone Garden is stylistically seperate from the rest of the album, beyond being the only track not written by Oxley. I think because the music, as I hear it, lacks a rhythmic or even tonal center, it creates the searching/ wandering traveller feeling that Oxley apparently had in mind. I'm having trouble describing the playing on this album. Tony Oxley is especially propulsive but he always seems to remain sensitive to the context of the music. I think the band's playing throughout is superb and always serves the compositions greatly. I have taken a lot away from The Baptised Traveller in the short time that I have owned it and I would not be surprised in the least to find myself increasingly attached to the music as time goes on.

One of the problems with early British improv has been that recordings haven't always been easy to get a hold of, since a number of them were recorded for larger corporations that haven't been very interested in reissuing them. For instance, the classic 1968 SME date _Karyobin_, recorded for Island, was unavailable until very recently, with the Chronoscope reissue. ECM still hasn't reissued a number of notable dates, like the Music Improvisation Company's final recording, or the Bailey/Holland duets. Deutsche Grammophon has a 3-LP set of free improv in its archives which they have never reissued. -- Fortunately Columbia has recently reissued a pair of Tony Oxley discs from this period, though I'd suggest snapping them up before they vanish again. _The Baptised Traveller_ is not strictly free-improv because all tracks involve composed materials (even a version of a Charlie Mariano tune), but the radicalness of the musical language is nonetheless apparent, especially on the opening blasts on the 1st track, & the freedoms of the last track, "Preparation". This is closer to American free jazz, in fact, than the MIC or (some lineups of) the SME; in particular I've never heard Evan Parker sound so directly Aylerish--it's quite revelatory listening for anyone who's only heard his more "mature" work. It's a terrific band, rather similar to _Karyobin_'s lineup: Evan Parker, Kenny Wheeler, Derek Bailey (who only plays on the 2nd side of the original album), Jeff Clyne & Oxley himself, playing "straight" kit rather than the more extravagant nonstandard kit & electronics he increasingly turned to in the 1970s. Documentation of Wheeler's "out" playing is rather thin on the ground at the moment, so this is especially welcome--& he's in marvellous form. Any fan of free-improv will want this album: it still packs a punch.