Guitarist Derek Bailey died 20 years ago this week, on December 25, 2005.

He was not a jazz musician. He played jazz at the beginning of his career, along with many other styles in many contexts — he was a professional musician who accompanied comedians and pop singers, and played on commercial recording sessions and in bars and dance halls. But his own interests lay in a fairly radical approach to improvisation; he sought to kick away every possible stylistic crutch and create “non-idiomatic” music independent of conventional languages. He was thus one of the crucial figures in the development of a unique improvised music scene in the UK and Europe, one that was not rooted in jazz or the blues or even the “indeterminacy” of avant-garde classical music.

Joined by like-minded collaborators and creative partners including Evan Parker, Tony Oxley, Han Bennink, Peter Brötzmann and later Cecil Taylor and John Zorn, among many, many others, he performed and recorded for decades, and eventually became a revered figure. Just as he’d done as a more conventional working guitar player, he found as many avenues for his unique brand of improvisation as possible, often setting up duo encounters but also participating in larger groups at times.

Bailey’s music is absolutely not for everyone. Anyone coming in looking for melody, repetition, strict rhythm, or any other conventional formal aspect will walk away disappointed. Honestly, it’s hard to say what one should even be listening for when listening to Bailey. And yet, when it catches you, his scrabbling, skritching, pinging tones, the sudden surges of volume and feedback that just as quickly recede, the outbursts followed by long melancholy drones… it sounds like nothing else in the world. He was one of one.

I interviewed Bailey in 2002, for Jazziz magazine. Again, he was not a jazz artist. And I had only heard a few of his albums (and had not fully come to grips with how much he was not an album artist; he did things once, then moved on, and really was not attached to the idea of recordings at all) when we spoke. But it was a pleasant encounter, and I think the piece turned out quite well; in fact, it contains a quote that’s featured prominently on his Wikipedia page, and I didn’t put it there. So in honor of the anniversary of his passing, I’m reproducing the story in full below.

If you’re interested in exploring his music afterward, the following titles are some of my favorites. None of them are on streaming services, so you’ll have to seek them out in record stores or on Discogs. But the search will be worth it, I promise.

The Topography Of The Lungs (with Evan Parker and Han Bennink)

Derek Bailey & Han Bennink (duo with Bennink)

Daedal (duo with Susie Ibarra)

Ore (duo with Eddie Prévost)

Topographie Parisienne (Dunois, April 3d, 1981) (with Parker and Bennink)

THE GRIT THAT PRODUCES THE PEARL

A radical improviser without peer or precedent, guitarist Derek Bailey continues to create music of a strange and high order.

“My personal view of jazz is that it’s largely irrelevant to what I do, but because of my background, probably, I think of it as sort of petering out sometime in the ’50s. But that might be because my dedicatory interest in it petered out in the ’50s.” These are fighting words to many jazz fans. But coming from a fellow as genial and even-tempered as British guitarist and totemic free-improviser Derek Bailey, it’s hard to take offense. Bailey is a tall, thin figure who doesn’t draw much attention to himself, personally. He just travels the world, playing some of the wildest, most unfettered guitar ever heard. Since the mid-1960s, he’s been quietly but fundamentally altering the way adventurous music listeners think, not only about the guitar, but about music in general.

Bailey’s guitar sound is a gnarled mass of tension, which makes his relaxed onstage demeanor all the more fascinating. He plays from a seated, nearly reclining position, controlling three pedals with his feet. He never plays a linear set of chords, and there are no riffs in his music — only streams of notes and occasional bursts of raw, shocking noise. At times he sinks into nearly total silence, with only a few tiny, almost imperceptible pings and scrapes to indicate that he’s still going. But then will come a sudden surge of volume from his foot pedal, and a single, jarring note or clump of sounds will shoot forth from the stage and strike the audience like a tangled ball of barbed wire. Upon first (and even second or third) hearing, his music might sound random or almost deliberately wrong — even to listeners who think they’ve absorbed all the different ways jazz can go “free.” The trick to understanding Bailey is to attain a state somewhere between concentration and napping, so that the music enters the mind with as much looseness and freedom as influenced its creation.

Born in England in 1930, Bailey grew up and began his career as a musician during swing’s peak years. He started as a journeyman musician, taking whatever gigs were available. “I played for drinkers, for dancers, for eaters, for strippers, for singers, for animals, for wrestlers… I even played for listeners,” he says of his early years. But then Bailey realized jazz wasn’t his future, after all. “By the time I was about 23 or 24,” he explains, “I decided that if I wanted to be a jazz player, I should have started in a different place, a different time, and maybe in a different race. And I was very aware that the guitar player I particularly admired, Charlie Christian, was dead by the time h got to the age I was already at — and I was nowhere.”

Bailey’s love for his music is balanced by an unwillingness to work a day job. “I couldn’t make a living at it,” he says of his decision to abandon jazz, “and that was always essential to me. And it’s been essential playing this music, to make a living at it. I would not play freely improvised music as a hobby. I don’t believe in music as a hobby; it’s too hard a taskmaster.”

In order to succeed at what many might believe would be an impossible task — making a comfortable living while playing totally uncompromising, avant-garde music — Bailey has adopted a very open-minded strategy. Put simply, he’ll play with just about anybody. He’s accompanied the Japanese Butoh dancer Min Tanaka on numerous occasions. He’s played duos with virtually every major drummer in free jazz and improvised music, including Eddie Prévost, Milford Graves, Han Bennink, Tony Oxley, and Susie Ibarra. He’s worked in large ensembles like the Globe Unity Orchestra (run by pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach) and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. He even plays and records solo, though he’d rather not.

One of Bailey’s most productive professional relationships — both from an artistic and a financial standpoint — has been with another willful avant-gardist who’s also managed to make a living at it: John Zorn. Bailey’s released two CDs on Zorn’s Tzadik label and three others on Avant, Zorn’s Japanese label. He also recorded Yankees with Zorn and trombonist George Lewis in 1983. “I don’t want to generalize about this thing too much,” Bailey says, “because I wouldn’t know — but my impression is that music can very easily settle into ruts. In fact, it likes ruts. Players like ruts and they slide into them as soon as possible. [Zorn is] one of the guys who’s flattened a few ruts out.”

The Tzadik and Avant discs can be understood in two ways. The listener can either view them as bizarre tangents to Bailey’s larger body of work, or as improbable evidence of the universality of his music. The latter interpretation seems almost paradoxical, given the absolute individuality of his sound. One of the earliest is 1995’s Saisoro, a trio date on which the rhythm section is the bass-drums duo the Ruins, a splatter-rock outfit who have recorded numerous albums on their own. This was followed in 1996 by Guitar, Drums ’n’ Bass, a CD on which Bailey played along with, or over, the skittering, hyperactive rhythm patterns of drum ’n’ bass techno. On Bailey’s most recent Zorn-sponsored release, 1999’s Mirakle, he fronts bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and drummer Calvin Weston, a pair best known for their work in Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time. With Mirakle, the trio creates a kind of “free funk” noisefest that never loses the groove but never pays it much attention either.

Though he throws himself into nearly any recording situation that’s offered, Bailey hardly ever listens to the finished discs, preferring to move on. However, when time allows, he plans on listening to 2001’s Ore (Arrival) “just to see if it matches my impressions, which were that it was quite fresh in some way.” The album is a duo recorded with drummer Eddie Prévost of the British improv trio AMM. Bailey says of the drummer, “We both kind of, I suppose, are pursuing the same thing by different means. So it was really very nice — the level of exploratoriness was quite high in it. It’s not always easy to get that.”

Ore is a fascinating, starkly beautiful record. Bailey’s guitar sounds at some points like it’s being ground into splinters. Other times, it sounds like a giant sheet of metal being torn apart by robot hands. Prévost plays the drums as though he’s only recently discovered them and doesn’t want to make any sudden moves for fear of an unexpected, unpredictable catastrophe. (This is a far cry from Bailey’s work with Han Bennink, a Dutch drummer who often seems to bear his kit some indescribable, unforgivable grudge.) Bailey and Prévost move around one another in wide, sweeping arcs throughout the disc’s 50-plus minutes, never jelling into anything that resembles traditional collective music making. At the same time they create a space between what they’re doing as individuals, and in that space is a vibrating hunk of pure, glowing beauty. This, it seems, is exactly what Bailey seeks from a partner.

“There has to be some degree, not just of unfamiliarity, but incompatibility,” he contends. “Otherwise, what are you improvising for? What are you improvising with or around? You’ve got to find somewhere where you can work. If there are no difficulties, it seems to me that there’s pretty much no poitn in playing. I find that the things that excite me are trying to make something work. And when it does work, it’s the most fantastic thing. Maybe the most obvious analogy would be the grit that produces the pearl in an oyster, or some shit like that.”

In nearly four decades of uninterrupted free improvisation, Derek Bailey has littered the world of avant-garde music with pearls. He continues to do so, never looking back but always seeking the next unfamiliar situation or improbable circumstance from which he can conjure his unique brand of beautiful, unsettling music.