- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Quartet Books (10 May 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0704381516
- ISBN-13: 978-0704381513
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,137,409 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Given that Improv shares some of it's fractious roots with the revolutionary socialist subcultures of the 1960's, it's hardly surprising that at times Ben Watson's book resembles a Stalinist purge. After roundly dismissing:
1)All commercial recorded music (apart from Zappa and the Sex Pistols, because he likes them)
2)Jazz (historically and culturally specific idiom - now redundant),
3)Classical music (bourgeois heritage industry),
4)John Cage (irrelevant except as a response to the bourgeois heritage industry)
5)Experimental music of Nyman, Bryars etc. (selling-out to the bourgeois heritage industry),
6)Improv as practiced by Cardewites, AMM etc., Evan Parker after he fell out with Bailey (wrong sort of Improv),
7)Recorded Improv (Bailey was famously dismissive of his own vast recorded output)
- the author leaves us with the impression that the only authentic way to appreciate music is to watch Derek Bailey himself perform live - fine, except the great man passed away in 2005!
Pros (1) - Laughs a-plenty - including the brilliant 'invisible jukebox' interview from 'Wire' magazine.
(2) Excellent first half of the book with a fascinating overview of Bailey's life as a jobbing bandsman.
(3) Ben Watson - witty, erudite, challenging.
Cons: (1) Loses it's way in the second half and turns into a description of a series of gigs - largely falling into two categories - improv that worked and improv that didn't.
(2) Ben Watson
1)All commercial recorded music (apart from Zappa and the Sex Pistols, because he likes them)
2)Jazz (historically and culturally specific idiom - now redundant),
3)Classical music (bourgeois heritage industry),
4)John Cage (irrelevant except as a response to the bourgeois heritage industry)
5)Experimental music of Nyman, Bryars etc. (selling-out to the bourgeois heritage industry),
6)Improv as practiced by Cardewites, AMM etc., Evan Parker after he fell out with Bailey (wrong sort of Improv),
7)Recorded Improv (Bailey was famously dismissive of his own vast recorded output)
- the author leaves us with the impression that the only authentic way to appreciate music is to watch Derek Bailey himself perform live - fine, except the great man passed away in 2005!
Pros (1) - Laughs a-plenty - including the brilliant 'invisible jukebox' interview from 'Wire' magazine.
(2) Excellent first half of the book with a fascinating overview of Bailey's life as a jobbing bandsman.
(3) Ben Watson - witty, erudite, challenging.
Cons: (1) Loses it's way in the second half and turns into a description of a series of gigs - largely falling into two categories - improv that worked and improv that didn't.
(2) Ben Watson
Format:Hardcover
all that you need to know to understand the beginnings fo this terrific musical movement.
Names, dates, concerts, interviews...all that you need to know before start to play or to listen.
Good¡¡
Names, dates, concerts, interviews...all that you need to know before start to play or to listen.
Good¡¡
8 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
It may seem unlikely that the most brilliant, most innovative, most electrically alert practitioner of improvised music on the guitar should be a crusty 74-year-old from Sheffield, but it's nevertheless the case. This biography of Derek Bailey is both a faithful account of the man's career to date, and a further effort to change hearts and minds by one of the best music writers in the world. Ben Watson's earlier book on Frank Zappa is a hurricane in book form, and his further treatise on aesthetics "Art, Class and Cleavage" was even more fabulously outside. This volume sees him in relatively restrained form, perhaps because his subject was both still alive and notoriously ornery.
Bailey has invented an entirely new way of playing the guitar, very loosely derived from the mature work of Anton Webern but entirely his own. His discography is gigantic, and the one in this book is incomplete (I only know this because a 1998 CD came into my possession after reading this book that isn't listed therein.) He spent roughly 15 years as a purely commercial guitar player, an all-round session man, before deciding that he needed to find a way of playing what he came to realise he really wanted to play. This book tells you how he came to these decisions, and what happened after.
The bits of the book that consist of quotes from Bailey himself are truly priceless (his comic timing can't have been damaged by playing in the pit band for Morecambe and Wise) but Watson's accounts of great gigs make you ache that you weren't there. It is also, almost casually, an argument for the importance of free improvisation as a vital current for music itself. Buy this book and whack your jazz snob friends over the head with it. And then listen to Derek Bailey play - the best way is to trek to Barcelona, where he now spends most of his time, and watch him live. Bailey's distrust of recorded music is genuinely provocative. This book, to paraphrase Deep Purple, might just change your life.
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