Derek Bailey Quotes

#1. Personally, I've found that the kind of thing that I like is going into somebody else's area and not playing their music but doing whatever I do in their area.

Derek Bailey

#2. In the absence of that, I am happy to play solo, but I don't think there is any comparison.

Derek Bailey

#3. Personally, I've found one of the more stimulating ways of playing in recent times has been to kind of move outside the free improvised area and work with people who are probably improvisers but they have a particular way of working.

Derek Bailey

#4. In fact it's quite gratifying for me to see some of the people who really objected to this method of working now being quite so profligate in their use of it.

Derek Bailey

#5. I think the blues is fine for blues players, but free blues has never made much sense to me.

Derek Bailey

#6. For me, playing is about playing with other people.

Derek Bailey

#7. I'm not much into current electronic stuff, what I think of as lounge electronics, mumbling electronics.

Derek Bailey

#8. I've always liked the effect of having somebody in there who hadn't the faintest idea what was going on.

Derek Bailey

#9. I don't research anything.

Derek Bailey

#10. Younger players in this music often turn out to be middle aged; it is not a young music.

Derek Bailey

#11. I wouldn't want to be ideological about it but I think of it as being the best way to approach this kind of playing. I don't think it works in other music, other kinds of playing.

Derek Bailey

#12. If you could only play a record once, imagine the intensity you'd have to bring into the listening.

Derek Bailey

#13. Solo concerts are murder, I find; I don't like doing them.

Derek Bailey

#14. I have always been attracted to the cottage industry side of this business.

Derek Bailey

#15. But that methodology where players are pitted against other unfamiliar players has been so widely adapted now that anybody plays with everybody.

Derek Bailey

#16. For me, Company is still the best way for me to work.

Derek Bailey

#17. Nowadays, I really like playing in studios.

Derek Bailey

#18. Diversity is its most consistent characteristic ... The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it.

Derek Bailey

#19. I like duos with percussionists. I like the songs that percussionists sing.

Derek Bailey

#20. Charlie Appleyard can be anybody; but Ive used him sometimes in chat pieces, and these are all chat pieces about the history of Charlie Appleyard.

Derek Bailey

#21. Playing music is not really susceptible to theory much. Circumstances affect it so much.

Derek Bailey

#22. Even if it is difficult playing with other people - sometimes it's great, sometimes it isn't, but that is kind of the point of it. It loses its point playing solo.

Derek Bailey