Derek Bailey... what can you say?

Derek Bailey passed away on Christmas. I just found out today. There's enough obituaries out there explaining who he was, what he did, what his music was like... what can I write but my own personal impressions?

I was travelling with a friend one day to Vermont, driving up I-95, on our way to a music festival of unknown hippie jam bands. This was 1989 or so - the retro fad for groups like Phish, etc., was just beginning to creep to life. Jerry Garcia was still alive. And we're cruising along in his clunky old Volkswagon bus listening to local college radio, whatever we could find, and we came across a jazz show - some station out of Amherst, if I remember right.

I was still dabbling in serialism back then, and my fascination was for music that was complex on paper. Still, there was something about the whole serialist / modernist school that just didn't speak to me. On an intellectual level, there was something fun about it - but on a purely visceral level, it was lacking.

And then I heard something that night.

It was so... organic. There was no concern for such things as melody, harmony, rhythm. Just guitar and drums - but like nothing I'd ever heard. This was no hippie jam.

You could tell these two guys - whoever they were - had some kind of simpatico that was truly rare and beautiful. Anticipating each other's moves, smoothly moving from one emotion to another - angry, tense, and what stood out most of all - silly. These guys took themselves seriously, no doubt, but there was a gentle humor to it all.

I sat in rapt silence throughout - getting lost in the music, letting it take me where it did. Did it "groove"? In a way. Something about it let the audience "in" in a way that the purely composed music I'd been poring over didn't. It didn't require study, or acclimation. It was what it was, and took you along for the ride.

The set ended and I listened for the name - Derek Bailey and Han Bennink. ?? Who were these guys? This was in the days before the internet. I'd never heard these names before.

I demanded we pull over to a rest stop so I could call the radio station. I talked to the DJ for a few minutes - I don't remember for the life of me her name, but she schooled me with a three-minute crash course in free jazz. I'd heard some already - Ornette and late period Coltrane. Some worked for me and some didn't. But there was something different about this stuff. Was it even jazz? She gave me a few names to check out, pointed me down the path. We got back to the van in time to hear her introduce another track - just for me! - a Cecil Taylor / Max Roach duet that just killed.

I never spoke to her again, but I will marry that woman someday.

After we pulled in to our campsite, I was feeling inspired. I pulled my banjo out of the back and began plonking away, much to the dismay of our campsite-mates. I suppose it's bad enough hearing someone who doesn't know what they're doing play free jazz. But to do it on a banjo... I needed some work, but I knew I'd found a direction to explore, something that spoke to me.

And so I began. Derek Bailey was not exactly common in music stores, but finally I found some at Cutler's Music in New Haven CT. The two albums I picked up - the one I'd heard, simply titled Han, and a solo album called Aida - couldn't have been more different. I knew right off the bat I loved these guys. That humor I'd heard was right there on the cover of Han - a cartoony drawing of a destroyed guitar neck with two hands coming in from either side - one with a saw, in the other, wire cutters.

Aida was a different kind of revelation: It had it's aggressive side, sure, but it was sparse and subtle too. It made sense to me. I listened to it constantly, getting lost in the spaces between the notes, the outbursts. And the way he played - there was only guitar listed, but it sounded like no guitar I'd ever heard. It was like some combination of a guitar, koto, and one of Cage's prepared pianos, but... there was nothing prepared about it.

The more I listened, the more I read about him, the more fascinated I became. I'd had no idea, but this guy was legend among his peers. It seemed odd I'd never heard of him before, but then all his recordings were on obscure European labels, mostly on a tiny label called Incus he owned himself. I worked in a music store myself at the time, but we had no distributor who carried this stuff. Most of it was, to my knowledge, out of print. But bit by bit I found more and more: classics like Cyro, his album of duets with Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista. Or the bizarre and funny Yankees, a meditation on baseball with George Lewis and John Zorn. And the indescribably beautiful Lace, another solo outing. One of the (many) great things about Bailey was the list of musicians he worked with. Through him (along with Bennink and Cecil Taylor, whose catalogs I was exploring with equal relish), I was introduced to so many other players they worked with: Lewis, Tony Oxley, Louis Moholo, and the incomparable Evan Parker. The younger guitarists he influenced read like a who's who of experimental guitar heroes: Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Marc Ducret, Eugene Chadbourne, and countless others.

I had trouble with this music as "jazz", though it certainly bore some relation - you can hear, at times, the influence of Django especially. But there was a touch of what seemed like Webern in there too. It was even further removed - further "out" than Ornette. I read later that Bailey himself wasn't really down with the term "jazz", and preferred to simply call his music "non-idiomatic" - a term which manages to be ridiculously vague yet describes his music better than any other I've heard.

John Allen on WFMU had a tribute show a couple days ago, which you can check out online here. There's some great stuff there. The duet with Fred Frith is particularly astounding, and there's wonderful tracks with Bennink and Parker of course.

What else is there to say? You can't describe Derek Bailey in words. Words are for suckers. Just listen.