Derek Bailey Quotes & Sayings

For me, playing is about playing with other people. — Derek Bailey

Undeniably, the audience for improvisation, good or bad, active or passive, sympathetic or hostile, has a power that no other audience has. It can affect the creation of that which is being witnessed. And perhaps because of that possibility the audience for improvisation has a degree of intimacy with the music that is not achieved in any other situation. — Derek Bailey

In the absence of that, I am happy to play solo, but I don't think there is any comparison. — Derek Bailey

I think the blues is fine for blues players, but free blues has never made much sense to me. — Derek Bailey

I have always been attracted to the cottage industry side of this business. — Derek Bailey

In fact it's quite gratifying for me to see some of the people who really objected to this method of working now being quite so profligate in their use of it. — Derek Bailey

I don't research anything. — Derek Bailey

I'm not much into current electronic stuff, what I think of as lounge electronics, mumbling electronics. — Derek Bailey

But that methodology where players are pitted against other unfamiliar players has been so widely adapted now that anybody plays with everybody. — Derek Bailey

Personally, I've found that the kind of thing that I like is going into somebody else's area and not playing their music but doing whatever I do in their area. — Derek Bailey

In so far as I listen with interest to a record, it's usually to figure out how it was arrived at. The musical end product is where interest starts to flag. It's a bit like jigsaw puzzles. Emptied out of the box, there's a heap of pieces, all shapes, sizes and colours, in themselves attractive and could add up to anything
intriguing. Figuring out how to put them together can be interesting, but what you finish up with as often as not is a picture of unsurpassed banality. Music's like that."
From "Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation" by Ben Watson, Verso, London, 2004, p. 440. — Derek Bailey

I've always liked the effect of having somebody in there who hadn't the faintest idea what was going on. — Derek Bailey

Nowadays, I really like playing in studios. — Derek Bailey

I wouldn't want to be ideological about it but I think of it as being the best way to approach this kind of playing. I don't think it works in other music, other kinds of playing. — Derek Bailey

Even if it is difficult playing with other people - sometimes it's great, sometimes it isn't, but that is kind of the point of it. It loses its point playing solo. — Derek Bailey

I like duos with percussionists. I like the songs that percussionists sing. — Derek Bailey

Diversity is its most consistent characteristic ... The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it. — Derek Bailey

If you could only play a record once, imagine the intensity you'd have to bring into the listening. — Derek Bailey

For me, Company is still the best way for me to work. — Derek Bailey

Younger players in this music often turn out to be middle aged; it is not a young music. — Derek Bailey

Personally, I've found one of the more stimulating ways of playing in recent times has been to kind of move outside the free improvised area and work with people who are probably improvisers but they have a particular way of working. — Derek Bailey

Charlie Appleyard can be anybody; but Ive used him sometimes in chat pieces, and these are all chat pieces about the history of Charlie Appleyard. — Derek Bailey

Playing music is not really susceptible to theory much. Circumstances affect it so much. — Derek Bailey

Solo concerts are murder, I find; I don't like doing them. — Derek Bailey

Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone-beginners, children, and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is available. Its accessibility to the performer is, in fact, something which appears to offend both its supporters and detractors ... And as regards method, the improvisor employs the oldest in music-making ... Mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation. — Derek Bailey