January 06, 2006
Thoughts on Derek Bailey + An Appreciation of Untamed Dissonance
Because I took a break from browsing the internet during the holidays, I missed reading the news that Derek Bailey passed away on December 23rd. Respectfully this week I've been listening to Saisoro and Music & Dance, two of several Bailey discs I own. I am continually awestruck by the vibrant, bracing music this man created. Bailey is the most curious and inventive guitar player I have ever heard. His technique is both brittle and brutal, delicate and demented, wooly and evanscescent. His improvisations challenge description. Cross-cut koto music with cubist rainfall. Invert thrash compacted be-bop doodles in a fun-house, puddle-punched mirror. Crystallize skronk. And that just goes for his electric guitar work. On acoustic you'll hear him stretching gossamer gut-string micro-atonalities from furious 6-string glissandi. (Williams, I think this is what Ribot was trying to achieve that night you saw him rubbing his guitar with an inflated balloon.) Intense, absurd, frightening, comical, heretical, organic, eclectic, Brechtian - in his most inspired moments Bailey sounds like a mechanical insect with typebar legs scurrying wildly across an amplified bed of gravel. And yeah, I mean that as a compliment.
For me, the appeal of Derek Bailey is two-fold. First and foremost, he worked at the extreme edges of the guitar, both literally and figuratively. From the nut down to the bridge, Bailey played the entire instrument. Through scratches, tugs, and plucks, he created a language on and around the fretboard that was wholly his own. Wait. "Language" may be a tad inappropriate when describing the work of a player know for a neo-primitive, free improvisational style. Bailey's instrumental voice is anything but grammatical. If this is language, it is a mad jumble of words. His solos speak in imaginative, dissonant clusters. Within these expressions, augmented chords and harmonic overtones bunch together in frantic phrases. Bailey's guitar playing re-enacts a writer crumbling up a sheet of paper more than it does a writer closing a sentence with a neat black dot. Radical atonality, klangfarbenmelodie, call it what you will, Bailey's sonic markings are unmistakable.
The second thing valuable about Bailey is his prodigious output. With a documented sessionography running from 1965 to 2004, he worked hard. There's a great deal of material to hear, if you can find it. Most of it exists on obscure European labels, making Bailey's discography extremely desirable from a collector's standpoint. Also he played with just about everyone - Pat Metheny, Dave Holland, Han Bennink, Keiji Haino, Gavin Bryars, Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke - the list goes on and on. But what really intrigues me as both a guitar player and a collector is a series of improvisations he released in 1973 called the Incus Taps.
From what I understand, the packaging of the "Incus Taps" were sort of a marketing gimmick. Initially Bailey released this series of solo improvisations in a reel to reel format. He custom labeled the boxes and literally made them to order. The idea was to highlight the spontaneity of these improvisations while also getting his music out in a cost efficient manner. No, I don't have any of these on reel. I wish I did. I do own the cd reissue put out by the organ of Corti label. The recordings are amazing - dry, angular, solo-guitar miniatures, punctuated by eerie harmonic chirps as well as daunting improv-chord flappings. They are weird, airy, and voluble, "out" with a brainy, bird-like, erratic energy, alternately spastic and poetic in their flights.
At the same time, the "Incus Taps" sound confessional. These are bedroom recordings - intimate, quirky, and personnal (also a little muffled) - and thus they feel, for lack of a better word, honest. Like diary entries, these recordings document a specific time and a place, an exact moment in the artist's development, an exhalation of musical thought caught on the glassy magnetic face of analog tape. It's one thing to hear Bailey reacting as a musician to other musicians but it's another thing entirley to hear him play solo. The "Incus Taps" showcase free musical expression in an incredibly private setting, making it a notably discreet product by a wildly unorthodox musician.
So thank you Derek Bailey for your music. Your guitar spoke in broken tongues. Your recordings captured dissonant spirits. Your legacy lives on.
Posted by Red Chuck at January 6, 2006 11:32 AM