Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation [Hardcover]

"I am an enthusiast for the Watson method and I'm prepared to follow him, even to places where I wouldn't under other circumstances go ... I feel profoundly unqualified to promote a text about which I have no specialist knowledge, and for which I have no innate sympathy - being left with unfocused support for the ongoing ever-fecund Watson project. His attack, his singularity. His indecent decency." - Iain Sinclair

Derek Bailey was at the top of his profession as a dance-band and record-session guitarist when, in the early 1960s, he began playing an uncompromisingly abstract music. As the Joseph Holbrooke Trio, with bassist Gavin Bryars and drummer Tony Oxley, Bailey forged a musical syntax which has since operated as an international counter to the banality of commercialism. Refusing to be labeled a "jazz" guitarist, Bailey has collaborated with performance artists, electronic experimentalists, classical musicians, Zen dancers, tap dancers, rock stars, jazzers, poets, weirdos and an endless stream of fiercely individual musicians. Today his anti-idiom of "Free Improvisation" has become the lingua franca of the "avant" scene, with Pat Metheny, John Zorn, David Sylvian and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore amongst his admirers. Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation lifts the lid on an artistic ferment which has defied every known law of the music business. Telling the story via taped interviews with Bailey and his cohorts, gig reports and album reviews (including an exhaustive discography of Bailey's vast and hard-to-track output), Ben Watson's spiky, partisan and often very funny biography argues that anyone who thought the avant-garde was dead simply forgot to listen.

Ben Watson is a regular contributor to The Wire, Signal to Noise and Hi-Fi News, and the author of Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, Art, Class & Cleavage: Quantulumcunque Concerning Materialist Esthetix and the novel Shitkicks & Doughballs.