Derek Bailey
January 29, 1932 - December 25, 2005

Experimental jazz guitarist whose free-form improvisations took performance on the instrument into a new sphere.

ONE of the most important figures in the worldwide development of free jazz and spontaneous improvisation, the guitarist Derek Bailey built his career around a series of paradoxes. A craggy-featured Yorkshireman, blunt-speaking, intelligent and articulate, he specialised in playing with an advanced degree of abstraction.

In creating music that eschewed conventional notions of pitch, harmony and rhythm, he nevertheless performed on the guitar, an instrument ideally suited to each of those three qualities. And although he was at the heart of such collective music-making activities as the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Company, his best work was generally performed alone or with one other musician.

Born in 1932, Derek Bailey grew up in Sheffield, and studied conventional guitar technique with John Duarte. For a decade after 1952, when he began to make his living as a professional guitarist, he played a huge variety of commercial engagements, and although he preferred to play jazz, in common with many of his contemporaries he often ended up playing the dance music of the day. He told one BBC interviewer that by the mid-1960s he had played Stella by Starlight just too many times, and so he began looking for new avenues to explore.

Initially he did this in a trio with the drummer Tony Oxley and the bassist (later the well-known composer) Gavin Bryars. The trio, called Joseph Holbrooke, made a rapid transition in the mid-1960s from conventional modern jazz to highly abstract free improvisation.

Settled in London, Bailey then became a vital element of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, a free improvisation group that included a number of the most advanced musical experimentalists in Britain, including the saxophonist Evan Parker and the drummer John Stevens. Simultaneously, Bailey also began to perform solo concerts, first in Europe, and then gradually expanding his horizons to take in Japan and the United States.

He specialised in creating edgy atmospheric music that explored the tonal and timbral possibilities of the guitar, yet his work was always underpinned with a theoretical framework, something he was later to express in his celebrated book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. First published in 1980, this became a Channel 4 documentary series, On the Edge, in 1991 and is widely regarded as one of the standard texts on creative improvisation.

Bailey's music was difficult for those unaccustomed to experimental sounds, and he was not particularly successful in finding commercial record companies interested in promoting his brand of music. In 1970 he founded Incus Records with Oxley and Evan Parker.

It remained a concern owned and run by musicians, with Bailey as its guiding light, once its other founders had moved on to other projects. It is by far the leading repository of Bailey's recorded work, although his playing has appeared on several other imprints, including ECM, Schanachie and the American Knitting Factory label.

The circulation of Incus records was never huge, but a respectable volume of sales built up over time, even though Bailey would joke that he lived permanently among boxes of unsold recordings.

By the late 1970s Bailey was mainly celebrated as a solo performer, but in 1976 he inaugurated the ensemble Company — a fluid group that drew its members from fellow improvisers in many parts of the world. The following year he began the first of a series of Company Weeks, in which a broad assortment of players gathered in London for five days of improvisation in public.

By the 1990s, Bailey was a well-known figure throughout Europe and in America, and he was a sought-after partner for such diverse musicians as the bassist and record producer Bill Laswell, the guitarist Pat Metheny and the bassist Joelle Leandre. Yet he also sought out more unusual contexts for his work including such highlights as a Radio 3 broadcast with the Japanese 'sonic terrorist' Keije Heino, an album with the downtown New Yorker John Zorn, and recordings with DJ Ninj.

Bailey continued to work at the cutting edge of experimentation until the onset of motor neurone disease ended his playing career.

Derek Bailey, jazz and free improvising guitarist, was born on January 29, 1932. He died on December 25, 2005, aged 73.