ECA [1992], Derek Bailey (Scatter Archive)
It’s not often one gets the opportunity to combine the words ‘Derek Bailey recently discovered audience’ and ‘recording’ in one sentence, but this is one of those occasions. ECA [1992] was recorded by Robin Parker in the Wee Red Bar, the student club at the Edinburgh College of Art. Bailey was doing a solo gig there, having earlier given a talk on improvisation. The original recording has been been mastered by Olaf Rupp and what we have here – thanks to Parker and Rupp – is a new Derek Bailey album to set alongside the others.
Listening to it, one is struck not only by Bailey’s trademark blend of playful invention, humour and seriousness, but how it bears out the things he said about improvisation. First, though, the word itself. He was ambivalent about it, only using it because he couldn’t think of a better one. He was worried that it suggests improvisers simply make it up as they go along, when, in fact, they often put in a lot of thought and preparation. (I’m not sure if he said it and I’m sure I’m not the first person to think it, but actually, the word ‘improvisation’ is only necessary in order to distinguish it from written music. If we hadn’t made such a fetish over the centuries of distinguishing composers from performers and writing music down, the word would be unnecessary. Improvisers are simply makers of music).
In his book, Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice in Music, Bailey divided improvisation into the idiomatic (flamenco, for example) and the non-idiomatic. Of non-idiomatic, ‘freely improvised’ music, he said ‘it has no stylistic or idiomatic commitment. It has no prescribed idiomatic sound. The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it.’ He thought the lumping together of free improv with avant-garde and experimental music was, back then, more in the interests of promoters than performers. So, although he was influenced by the avant-garde, by Webern’s angular, dissonant almost anti-melodies for example, he was also open to any of the wide ranging musical experiences that shaped his own ‘sonic musical identity’ (and a pretty eclectic sonic identity it was: apart from his work as an improviser, Bailey had worked extensively as a session musician with, among others, Morecambe and Wise and Bob Monkhouse).
This stylistic shape-shifting is very much on display here from the beginning of the first track, as he shifts seamlessly from atonal, semitone-heavy clouds of notes to simple jazz cadential patterns and back again, often settling in intriguing grey areas between the two. There are four tracks in all, the music forever shifting through a process of musical stream-of-consciousness: there are hectic bursts of atonality; long, mellow sections; explosions of noise; melodic ideas taken for long, hypnotic walks. It’s all there.
A year before his performance at the Wee Red Bar, Bailey wrote the introduction to the revised edition of his Improvisation. In it, he said, ‘The difference between the present musical climate and that of the mid-1970s … could hardly be greater. Most surveys of the intervening decade and a half tend to be lamentations on the galloping artistic cowardice, shrivelled imaginations and self-congratulatory philistinism which typified the period.’ He goes on to say, though, that ‘the changes that have taken place seem to have made very little difference to improvisation.’ This is an interesting observation to reflect on, now, over thirty years later. And was Bailey right about improvisation being a methodology rather than a style? I tend to think of what he said as a thought-provoking creative stimulus rather than dogma: what it says to me is that style is cliché and that if one wants to ‘make it new’ one has to be prepared to draw on anything and everything at one’s disposal, as free as possible from stylistic preconceptions. It’s still interesting to ask, though, if characteristics of the music are determined first and foremost by the performer’s ‘sonic musical identity’, then how have the changes in the wider world of music over the past thirty years affected the evolution of improvising performers’ identities (and, by extension, the stuff of freely improvised music)?
Whatever the answer, no doubt Bailey would be pleased to know that improvised music is still alive and well, despite the continuing efforts of the mainstream cultural industries, over the past half century, to replace the arts with entertainment. And he’d be humbled – though, perhaps feel a little uneasy – to know that his was still the name to be checked, that he has become so much a part of the ‘sonic identity’ of so many improvising musicians today, that people still tend to define themselves in relation to what he did. And, thanks to Scatter Archive, we now have another forty-five minutes of his improvisations to listen to. What’s not to like?
.
Dominic Rivron
LINK
ECA [1992]: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/eca-1992
.