Derek Bailey
Joachim Pense
Weiß jemand mehr?
Joachim
> I received the following information tonight from Jack Woker. Has
> anyone else heard anything about Derek's passing?
>
>>From Jack:
>
>
> Although I have seen no official announcement, reports on the Jazz
> Corner and Organissimo boards are saying that guitarist Derek Bailey
> passed away today, December 25. He was 75.
>
> jack
thomas schönsgibl
Joachim Pense schrieb:
> Weiß jemand mehr?
das kam bei mir gerade rein:
Derek Bailey, the British free improvising avant garde guitarist,
passed away aged 75 on December 25, in Barcelona, Spain, his
adopted home during the past few years.
A bio and tribute page has been put together on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Bailey
His innovative approach will be sorely missed. Thanks Derek.
Alisdair MacRae Birch
Guitarist/Bassist/Educator/Arranger
http://www.alisdair.com
thomas schönsgibl
> hallo,
> Joachim Pense schrieb:
>
> > Weiß jemand mehr?
>
> Alisdair MacRae Birch
> Guitarist/Bassist/Educator/Arranger
> http://www.alisdair.com
das ist noch ein mail von alidair. ( vielleicht ist das jetzt schon ein
bißchen zuviel;-)
Obits:
Derek Bailey
Restlessly creative guitarist forever pushing at the boundaries of music
John Fordham
Thursday December 29, 2005
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1674695,00.html
On and off over the past decade, I would meet Derek Bailey in the same
Chinese restaurant in Dalston, north London. As well as being a
wonderful raconteur, the Yorkshire-born guitarist regularly blew holes
in convenient wisdoms sitting smugly on some shelf in my head. His
provocativeness was not oneupmanship, or a parade of erudition; it was
the way his brain was wired. He had done the same for musicians and
listeners all over the world for 40 years or more as a free-player and
a freethinker, a Frank Zappa for the world of spontaneous performance.
Bailey, who has died aged 75 of complications from motor neurone
disease, was a guru without self-importance, a teacher without a
rulebook, a guitar-hero without hot licks and a one-man counterculture
without ever believing he knew all the answers - or maybe any at all.
With his passing, the world has lost an inimitable musician and an
implacable enemy of commercialised art.
Bailey once described his friend John Zorn, the American avant-garde
composer and improviser, as "a Diaghilev of contemporary music" for
his catalytic influence. But he could as easily have been describing
himself. He worked with performers as different as free-jazz piano
legend Cecil Taylor, cool school saxist Lee Konitz, Harlem
bop-and-swing hoofer Will Gaines, naked Japanese improvising dancer
Min Tanaka, fusion guitar star Pat Metheny and the drum virtuoso Tony
Williams. In later years, he collaborated with Japanese art-of-noise
rock band the Ruins, and - when he had already passed 70 - with young
drum and bass DJs.
Singlemindedly devoted to unpremeditated improvisation, Bailey
published a book on the subject in 1980 called Improvisation: Its
Nature and Practice in Music. Twelve years later, it led to Jeremy
Marre's revealing Channel 4 four-parter On the Edge: Improvisation in
Music, an ambitious venture that Bailey both scripted and presented.
The project tracked the improvising impulse through the most radical
interpreters of Mozart, the methods of the organist at the Sacré
Coeur, Paris, in baroque music or the blues, and in locations from the
Hebrides to the Ganges.
Bailey was born to George and Lily Bailey, in the Abbeydale district
of Sheffield. His father was a barber, his uncle a professional
guitarist who gave the boy his first instrument and some haphazard
lessons. By a process of osmosis from musicians he met, sustenance
from odd jobs, record-listening (bebop guitar pioneer Charlie
Christian was his early model) and some later self-education in theory
and arranging, Bailey became a pro on the UK dance-band and studio
circuit in the early 1950s. By 1965, he was playing Blackpool seasons
for Morecambe and Wise.
By that time, he had begun rehearsing regularly with two adventurous
younger players in Sheffield - classical percussionist turned jazz
drummer Tony Oxley and bassist (later to become classical composer)
Gavin Bryars. The three formed the group Joseph Holbrooke (named after
an obscure British composer whose work they never played), and, from
1963 to 1966, its jazz beginnings in John Coltrane and the Bill Evans
Trio were crossbred with ideas from John Cage, Stockhausen, serialism,
Oxley's labyrinthine rhythm variations, and much more. Gradually, the
group moved from jazz into a non-idiomatic approach -
free-improvisation.
>From 1966, Bailey began visiting the Little Theatre Club, a West End
bolthole where the drummer John Stevens ran all-comers' sessions and
young improvisers (including Evan Parker, Trevor Watts and Paul
Rutherford), jazz virtuosi (Dave Holland, Kenny Wheeler) and
contemporary classical players like Barry Guy gathered. With various
versions of Stevens' Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Oxley's sextet, the
Music Improvisation Company (electronics, percussion and Parker's sax)
and the trio Iskra 1903 (with trombonist Rutherford and bassist Guy),
Bailey began to build a completely new vocabulary for the guitar.
Though he never abandoned the conventional instrument, he was mixing
warped chordal ideas, serialism's lateral melodies, Cage's elevation
of silence, pedal-operated electronics and a brittle attack borrowed
from percussionists. From 1970, he also ran the Incus Records label,
first with Oxley and Parker, then with his partner (and later third
wife) Karen Brookman - their Hackney flat is still the Incus HQ.
Bailey's Diaghilev qualities came to the fore in 1976, when he began
his Company project, an improvisers' festival that involved 400
players each year up to 1994 in Britain, the US and Japan, with Zorn,
Lee Konitz, saxist Steve Lacy, classical violinist Alexander
Balanescu, bassoonist Lindsey Cooper and composer/saxist Anthony
Braxton among those taking part. He also invited dancers,
performance-artists, electronica-specialists and avant-rockers to join
in, with the artists deciding who would improvise with who.
He likened improvisation to spontaneous relationships and conversation
- full of accidental harmonies, misunderstandings, passion and
indifference. Though a sophisticated instrumentalist himself, he did
not mind playing with people who had comparatively few skills;
something interesting might always happen. He worked with bassist Bill
Laswell and drummer Tony Williams in the trio Arcana in 1995, and
collaborated with Pat Metheny and two percussionists on The Sign Of
Four in 1996.
He described that encounter to me thus: "The equipment I use I bought
in Canal Street 15 years ago. Pat's sitting in the middle of what
looks like the console of a 747, with four guitars and a distortion
unit that could be used for dispersing mobs. There were two guys with
huge percussion kits, and I'm making a lot of noise, and then he
switches this thing on, and it's like there's three dogs playing
around a little, and suddenly an elephant lands on top of them."
Yet for all that raw-noise energy, Bailey continued to be a delicate
acoustic improviser, often unaccompanied or in duets. Just in time, he
was caught by the ideal biographer, Ben Watson, in the book Derek
Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation. And, though his
combativeness never left him, he seemed to take heart from the musical
eclecticism and dissolution of idiomatic differences he had done so
much to encourage.
"The kids don't mind whatever it is these days," he told me once.
"Maybe there's a lot of stuff out there now that is by its nature odd.
But they seem to be able to take anything. Which is great to somebody
like me. I find it very comfortable. In an uncomfortable sort of way."
Karen survives him, as does Simon, the son of his second marriage.
Richard Williams writes: The least typical recording Derek Bailey ever
made also turned out (not that he would have appreciated the
compliment) to be one of the great jazz recordings of the last 40
years. Titled simply Ballads, and recorded in 2002 for John Zorn's
Tzadik label, it consisted of solo guitar meditations on 14 songs from
the standard repertoire, including Laura, Body and Soul, What's New,
Stella by Starlight and You Go to My Head.
Although this was the last project one might have expected from a
professed enemy of composed music, it was no surprise to discover that
in these songs - their musical and emotional contours long since
flattened by overuse - Bailey found brand new angles and meanings,
thanks to the application of his highly personal imagination and
unique instrumental language. Extraordinary renditions, indeed, and
utterly spellbinding.
By the time he recorded another solo CD for Tzadik, entitled Carpal
Tunnel, three years later, his refined technique had all but
disappeared. No longer able to grasp a plectrum with his right hand,
he adapted by striking the strings with his thumb. The album's title
came from the condition, carpal tunnel syndrome, that was said by
doctors to explain his reduced dexterity. In fact, it marked the onset
of the motor neurone disease from which he died.
In these pieces, the spiky elegance of Ballads is replaced by a
halting delicacy reminiscent both of Japanese koto music and of the
last paintings of Willem de Kooning, when illness had robbed the great
abstract expressionist of the power to do anything other than trace a
haunting shadow of the shapes and colours that had once burst from the
canvas.
· Derek Bailey, improvising guitarist, born January 29 1930; died
December 25 2005
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Derek Bailey
Avant-garde jazz guitarist
Published: 29 December 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article335441.ece
Derek Bailey, guitarist: born Sheffield 29 January 1930; twice married
(one son); died London 25 December 2005.
Oddly, for an avant-garde player whose music was so intense and
uncompromising that his following was devoted but small, the guitarist
Derek Bailey appeared at the 1968 Royal Command Performance. In his
time he also worked as an accompanist to Gracie Fields and Kathy Kirby
- and it should be pointed out that for the royal concert he was in
the pit band.
He turned his back on commercial music and rose to become the most
renowned member of the British free-form jazz movement.
Bailey had an uncompromising philosophy that involved exterminating
music that he had already played. It led him rigorously to move on
from one group of musicians to the next: he believed that familiarity
bred predictability. He was perhaps at his happiest in his
metamorphosis to solo guitar player. Paradoxically his improvisations
were recorded many times and the resultant albums were much sought by
his followers across the world.
He believed in turbulence and musical aggression, although it was
notable that, when more conventional musicians like Tony Coe or Steve
Lacy were drawn into his orbit, he softened to form exquisite musical
partnerships that led non-believers to wonder at what could have been.
In his regular conversations with his audiences he showed a beguiling
sense of humour that perhaps didn't chime with the density of the music.
But Bailey, like the musicians he mixed with, was a man convinced and
possessed. From his playing he stripped out rhythm and conventional
harmony and cast aside anything recognisable as jazz tradition. Over
the years he withdrew from group playing and played without
accompaniment. He worked often on the Continent, mostly in Germany,
but chose to stay in England.
"He was rapidly arriving at the stage where he saw the nearest
parallel to his own role in those of a writer or a painter," wrote the
trumpeter Ian Carr, who described Bailey as "fastidious and ascetic"
in his music:
He is austere, uncompromising and formidably committed to exploring
and expressing his own interior vision . . . With monastic vigilance
he tries to avoid the habitual side of playing.
Bailey was a key figure in the 13-hour concert played in Camden Town,
London, in the summer of 1978 by the London Musicians Collective -
this was in itself a compromise, because the saxophonist Evan Parker,
a close comrade of Bailey's, had planned for the musicians to play
around the clock.
Derek Bailey's grandfather was a professional banjo player and his
uncle a professional guitarist. He took to the guitar when he was 11
and became a professional musician in Sheffield during the Fifties,
working mostly at music that he didn't like. But, before leaving for
London in 1966, he formed his own avant-garde band that included the
like-spirited drummer Tony Oxley.
In London Bailey fell in with Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford, Barry Guy
and other free-form players and played regularly with the drummer John
Stevens's Spontaneous Music Ensemble. He joined the London Jazz
Composers' Orchestra and formed the trio Iskra 1903 with the
trombonist Rutherford and bassist Guy, whilst he was also a member of
the Music Improvisation Company. His frequent partnerships with Evan
Parker gained him fame across Europe and he was soon working with
musicians on the Continent and with visiting Americans including
Anthony Braxton and Steve Lacy.
With Rutherford, Guy and Bailey's wife Karen, Bailey in 1970 founded
the record company Incus, the first musician-run label in Britain, to
distribute their music. He eventually came to own the label himself
and continued its policy of never deleting albums. In 1976 he formed
Company, an ensemble bringing together groups of British and
international improvisers. An annual Company week was held for 17
years until 1994. Bailey was a member of Kenny Wheeler's band in 1978
but from then on mainly played as a soloist or at best in duos.
He made an exception during the Eighties when the avant-garde Ganelin
Trio came from Russia to work in Britain for a period. Bailey worked
happily with them until the leader, the pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin,
emigrated to Israel.
Bailey influenced guitarists as far away as Japan and in 1997 worked
with the avant-rock Japanese duo Ruins. In that period he also played
with the drummer Tony Williams and the guitarist Pat Metheny.
His book Improvisation: its nature and practice in music (1980) led to
the Channel 4 television series On the Edge (1989-91).
Steve Voce
Derek Bailey, guitarist: born Sheffield 29 January 1930; twice married
(one son); died London 25 December 2005.
Oddly, for an avant-garde player whose music was so intense and
uncompromising that his following was devoted but small, the guitarist
Derek Bailey appeared at the 1968 Royal Command Performance. In his
time he also worked as an accompanist to Gracie Fields and Kathy Kirby
- and it should be pointed out that for the royal concert he was in
the pit band.
He turned his back on commercial music and rose to become the most
renowned member of the British free-form jazz movement.
Bailey had an uncompromising philosophy that involved exterminating
music that he had already played. It led him rigorously to move on
from one group of musicians to the next: he believed that familiarity
bred predictability. He was perhaps at his happiest in his
metamorphosis to solo guitar player. Paradoxically his improvisations
were recorded many times and the resultant albums were much sought by
his followers across the world.
He believed in turbulence and musical aggression, although it was
notable that, when more conventional musicians like Tony Coe or Steve
Lacy were drawn into his orbit, he softened to form exquisite musical
partnerships that led non-believers to wonder at what could have been.
In his regular conversations with his audiences he showed a beguiling
sense of humour that perhaps didn't chime with the density of the music.
But Bailey, like the musicians he mixed with, was a man convinced and
possessed. From his playing he stripped out rhythm and conventional
harmony and cast aside anything recognisable as jazz tradition. Over
the years he withdrew from group playing and played without
accompaniment. He worked often on the Continent, mostly in Germany,
but chose to stay in England.
"He was rapidly arriving at the stage where he saw the nearest
parallel to his own role in those of a writer or a painter," wrote the
trumpeter Ian Carr, who described Bailey as "fastidious and ascetic"
in his music:
He is austere, uncompromising and formidably committed to exploring
and expressing his own interior vision . . . With monastic vigilance
he tries to avoid the habitual side of playing.
Bailey was a key figure in the 13-hour concert played in Camden Town,
London, in the summer of 1978 by the London Musicians Collective -
this was in itself a compromise, because the saxophonist Evan Parker,
a close comrade of Bailey's, had planned for the musicians to play
around the clock.
Derek Bailey's grandfather was a professional banjo player and his
uncle a professional guitarist. He took to the guitar when he was 11
and became a professional musician in Sheffield during the Fifties,
working mostly at music that he didn't like. But, before leaving for
London in 1966, he formed his own avant-garde band that included the
like-spirited drummer Tony Oxley.
In London Bailey fell in with Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford, Barry Guy
and other free-form players and played regularly with the drummer John
Stevens's Spontaneous Music Ensemble. He joined the London Jazz
Composers' Orchestra and formed the trio Iskra 1903 with the
trombonist Rutherford and bassist Guy, whilst he was also a member of
the Music Improvisation Company. His frequent partnerships with Evan
Parker gained him fame across Europe and he was soon working with
musicians on the Continent and with visiting Americans including
Anthony Braxton and Steve Lacy.
With Rutherford, Guy and Bailey's wife Karen, Bailey in 1970 founded
the record company Incus, the first musician-run label in Britain, to
distribute their music. He eventually came to own the label himself
and continued its policy of never deleting albums. In 1976 he formed
Company, an ensemble bringing together groups of British and
international improvisers. An annual Company week was held for 17
years until 1994. Bailey was a member of Kenny Wheeler's band in 1978
but from then on mainly played as a soloist or at best in duos.
He made an exception during the Eighties when the avant-garde Ganelin
Trio came from Russia to work in Britain for a period. Bailey worked
happily with them until the leader, the pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin,
emigrated to Israel.
Bailey influenced guitarists as far away as Japan and in 1997 worked
with the avant-rock Japanese duo Ruins. In that period he also played
with the drummer Tony Williams and the guitarist Pat Metheny.
His book Improvisation: its nature and practice in music (1980) led to
the Channel 4 television series On the Edge (1989-91).
Steve Voce
--------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/06/06/music-burk.php
Derek Bailey died on Christmas at age 75. It seems strange that such a
pleasant, thoughtful Englishman was one of the most radical
improvisers on his instrument, the electric guitar. But trailblazers
are not always terrors.
I interviewed Bailey by phone from his London home four years ago,
when he was scheduled to appear locally. He didn't come — partly
because of his health, and then there was that 9/11 thing, which had
just happened. He said he was terrified to fly.
Artistically, though, he was never afraid. In the mid-'60s, at a time
when the straight jazz he'd been playing was obsolescent, Bailey
gradually changed over to free music. He found a few like-minded
souls, and honed an approach that bucked every notion of swing in
favor of instant invention, tone refinement and harmonic
reconstitution (noise, said less perceptive listeners). In 1980, he
published a book of interviews with improvisers from various musical
disciplines. For many years, he helped put together a worldwide
concert series called Company. And over time, people began to know who
he was.
When he began getting free, though, he was a lonely inquirer. Ornette
Coleman had rethought sax; Thelonious Monk, Lennie Tristano and Cecil
Taylor had rethought piano. But rethinkers of the guitar? "There
weren't many, that's for sure," said Bailey, "and I didn't know who
the others were, if there were any."
The free-improv community he built in '60s England, unlike America's,
didn't mix its radicalism with drugs. "I was in my mid-30s, and the
people I met were usually in their early 20s. Unless you've been 36 in
1966, you don't know what ageism is. I'd been working with musicians
for 15 years at that point, but not like these. And one of the things
that struck me was how clean they were. They didn't take drugs,
usually they didn't smoke, they didn't drink, they didn't eat meat or
drink coffee. Quite militantly straight. Which was unusual for that
time. But they were unusual people anyway."
Bailey always appealed to the young. "There does appear to be a
different kind of audience now," he said, "but that's probably due to
the general state of, let's say, non-mainstream music, which seems to
be a kind of goulash. I'm able to find a place in that."
Do modern audiences understand him better? "They're more curious," he
said. "At one time this music clung onto the edges of jazz; it was
barely tolerated. But now there are these people who seem to be
prepared to listen to almost anything. I don't assume even at this
point that there are many people taking notice, but there are
certainly more than there used to be."
One who always took notice was L.A. guitarist Nels Cline. "He was one
of the most important sonic innovators on any instrument in the last
50 years," said Cline when he heard of Bailey's passing. "When I saw
him last year in Barcelona, I thanked him for being such a courageous
and tenacious seeker, and for making it possible for cowards like me
to benefit."
Joachim Pense
>
>
>> hallo,
>> Joachim Pense schrieb:
>>
>> > Weiß jemand mehr?
>>
>> Alisdair MacRae Birch
>> Guitarist/Bassist/Educator/Arranger
>> http://www.alisdair.com
>
> das ist noch ein mail von alidair. ( vielleicht ist das jetzt schon ein
> bißchen zuviel;-)
>
>
kein bisschen zuviel. VIelen, Vielen Dank.
Joachim