Derek Bailey, 75, Guitarist and Master of Improvisation, Dies
Ben Ratcliffe (NEW YORK TIMES, 30 December 30 2005)

Derek Bailey, the English guitarist who helped to form a fractured style and
a cohesive philosophy for European free improvisation, died at his home in
London on Sunday. He was 75.

The cause was complications of a motor neuron disease, said Martin Davidson,
a record producer and friend.

Mr. Bailey explained his art unpretentiously, often simply as a matter of
personal choice, but his style of playing guitar was a kind of reaction
against all systems in music. By the 1970's it had become a system unto
itself - a virtuosic, physical one, of clicks and chimes and harmonics and
aggressive bursts of volume, arrhythmic and nonlinear but still coherent and
powerful.

Despite his roots in jazz and his professional relationships with many jazz
musicians - he played with the drummers Tony Williams and Paul Motian, the
saxophonist Steve Lacy and the guitarist Pat Metheny - Mr. Bailey was not
playing jazz, nor pretending to. He often referred to his work as
"nonidiomatic improvising," meaning that it did not refer to any particular
idiom or style. Over time it became its own idiom, and he sought to perform
with artists from nonimprovising traditions, like the drum-and-bass producer
DJ Ninj and the Chinese pipa player Min Xiao-Fen, and even with
nonmusicians, like the Butoh dancer Min Tanaka and the tap dancer Will
Gaines.

Born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, Mr. Bailey grew up in a working-class family,
the son of a barber. An admirer of the jazz guitarists Charlie Christian and
Oscar Moore, he started guitar lessons as a boy, inspired partly by an uncle
who played guitar and worked in a music shop.

In 1950, after brief service in the British Navy, he began work as a
professional musician, playing jazz in pubs and restaurants in Sheffield. He
often worked in dance halls, and one of his jobs was in the pit band for
Morecambe and Wise, the popular English comedy team. More and more, he said
later in interviews, he would begin to practice his own ideas on the
bandstand, quietly, so the rest of the band could not hear.

By the mid-1960's, having become successful enough as a commercial musician
to buy a house in Manchester, Mr. Bailey had met the bassist Gavin Bryars
and the drummer Tony Oxley. Together they formed the Joseph Holbrooke Trio,
named after a British composer who had died a few years earlier. They began
playing a freer kind of jazz, sometimes basing it on the music of John
Coltrane's quartet and Bill Evans's trio but also trying to upend jazz
conventions.

Mr. Bailey at the time was heavily influenced by Anton Webern and wrote
pieces for solo guitar in Webern's style. He soon abandoned composition and
began practicing smaller units of sounds and notes, which he would fold into
improvisations.

After about 1967, Mr. Bailey did not compose in the traditional sense; he
only improvised from scratch, using all the tiny bits and phrases that he
had been working on. He became involved in an improvising group, the
Spontaneous Music Ensemble, but after that his music became more
concentrated and personal. He performed and recorded continuously, making
more than 100 albums, alone, in duets or in the various assemblages of
musicians that he finally organized into a regular event, Company, held in
various cities from 1976 to 2002.

In 1970 he helped start a record label, Incus, with the saxophonist Evan
Parker, one of his frequent musical colleagues until the mid-1980's. Between
Incus, which released 30 of his own recordings and still functions, and his
regular Company performances, Mr. Bailey kept busy through the 1990's,
playing with seemingly every major and minor figure in the world of
experimental improvised music.

In 1980 he wrote an influential book, "Improvisation: Its Nature and
Practice in Music," exploring improvisation in Indian music, flamenco, jazz,
rock and Baroque music. The book was adapted as a television series for
England's Channel Four in 1992.

Several years ago Mr. Bailey and his wife, Karen Brookman, began living part
time in Barcelona, Spain. They moved after Mr. Bailey started having
problems with his hands, a development he made public earlier this year with
his final record, "Carpal Tunnel."

He is survived by Ms. Brookman, of London and Barcelona, and a son, Simon
Bailey, of San Diego.

Some of Mr. Bailey's most celebrated albums were made in the last decade for
Avant and Tzadik, the New York saxophonist John Zorn's labels. One of them
was entirely counterintuitive for a musician who became famous for playing
no written music: called "Ballads," it consisted entirely of ballads favored
by jazz musicians, played in bursts of suggestion, in his craggy,
unsentimental, highly personal style.