Obituary: Derek Bailey, 2.1.2006 by David Toop
“But there are different ways of relating to the instrument, aren’t there? I’m a very traditional relater to the instrument. Unless I hold it in a certain way I can’t play it.” This was Derek Bailey, speaking two years ago in his kitchen in east London. Despite his thorough reconstruction of guitar language, Bailey considered himself to be a conventional musician. His holding of the guitar had been shaped over time, determined in the first instance by the priorities of post- war entertainment in which the relationship of performer to audience remained deferentially in service, a doffed cap, downstairs to the upstairs. In later years, audience initially non-existent, then more or less equal partners in the listening process, the stance prevailed as a...
Continue…Marcus Boon on "To Play: The Blemish Sessions"
Derek Bailey – To Play: The Blemish Sessions Samadhi Sound 2006 “Playing is really subversive of virtually everything ... And that’s where the life is in music. It always seems like it’s the vein, the conduit for life in the music. That appetite seems to me to be always to do with changing things, which is often to do with fucking things up.” - Derek Bailey. Derek Bailey died on Christmas Day, 2005, aged 75, leaving behind a lifetime of collaborations, friendships, and a vast treasure hoard of recordings accumulated in fifty years during which he was one of the principle figures responsible for the rise of improvisation in music in the West. One of his final collaborations was an unusual one...
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