Derek Bailey was at the top of his profession as a danceband and record-session guitarist when, in the early 1960s, he began playing an uncompromisingly abstract music. As the Joseph Holbrooke Trio, with bassist Gavin Bryars and drummer Tony Oxley, Bailey forged a musical syntax which has since operated as an international counter to the banality of commercialism. Refusing to be labelled a 'jazz' guitarist, Bailey has collaborated with performance artists, electronic experimentalists, classical musicians, Zen dancers, tap dancers, rock stars, jazzers, poets, weirdos and an endless stream of fiercely individual musicians. Today his anti-idiom of 'Free Improvisation' has become the lingua franca of the 'avant' scene, with Pat Metheny, John Zorn, David Sylvian and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore amongst his admirers.

Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation lifts the lid on an artistic ferment which has defied every known law of the music business. Telling the story via taped interviews with Baily and his cohorts, gig reports and album reviews (including an exhaustive discography of Bailey's vast and hard-to-find output), Ben Watson's spiky, artisan and often very funny biography argues that anyone who thought the avant-garde was dead simply forgot to listen.

CONTENTS:
Introduction: On Freedom
Child and Teenager, 1930-1951
Working Guitarist, 1950-1963
Joseph Holbrooke Trio, 1963-1966
Soloism and Freedom, 1966-1977
Company Weeks, 1977-1994
Improv International
Conclusion: On Improvisation
A Derek Bailey Discography; An Incus Discography; Derek Bailey's Complete Invisible Jukebox

BEN WATSON is a regular contributor to The Wire, Signal to Noise and Hi-Fi News, and the author of Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, Art, Class & Cleavage: Quantulumcunque Concerning Materialist Esthetix and the novel Shitkicks & Doughballs.

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