Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation

by Ben Watson

Overview

This brilliant biography of the cult guitar player will likely cause you to abandon everything you thought you knew about jazz improvisation, post-punk and the avant-garde. Derek Bailey was at the top of his profession as a dance band and recordsession guitarist when, in the early 1960s, he began playing an uncompromisingly abstract form of music. 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 among his admirers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781682401
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	07/02/2013
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	480
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Ben Watson is a writer on music and culture. He is the author of numerous books including Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, Art, Class & Cleavage and Adorno for Revolutionaries.

Table of Contents

	Introduction: On Freedom	1
1	Child and Teenager, 1930-1951	13
2	Working Guitarist, 1950-1963	33
3	Joseph Holbrooke Trio, 1963-1966	52
4	Soloism and Freedom, 1966-1977	112
5	Company Weeks, 1977-1994	205
6	Improv International	311
	Conclusion: On Improvisation	374
Appendix 1	A Derek Bailey Discography	379
Appendix 2	An Incus Discography	401
Appendix 3	Derek Bailey's Complete Invisible Jukebox	411
	Books Cited	441
	Index	445

What People are Saying About This

Iain Sinclair

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.

Editorial Reviews

"The ideal biographer of Derek Bailey."—John Fordham, Guardian

"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 ... His attack, his singularity. His indecent decency."—Iain Sinclair

From the Publisher

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