Ben Watson

Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation

(Verso Books)

Ben Watson's biography of the Sheffield-born free guitarist Derek Bailey (1930-2005) is an extraordinary book and one which is a true reflection in words of a judgement he makes of Bailey's own genius: "He wants to ground music in its played actuality."

But the book goes well beyond the life narrative of one man and his groundbreaking music. Watson also encompasses a very British story of free improvisation in the way Bailey's life was key to a deep study and understanding of the music, with very striking claims.

"It intimates what a world might be like in which everything was as resonant and responsive as these squeaks and squeals and bongs: the socialist vision of human acitivity as an end in itself, rather than merely the means to accumulate capital."

Watson tells of Bailey's boyhood and youth in the Abbeydale district of Sheffield, where his father ran a barber's shop, his wartime experiences of breaking into abandoned houses and gardens to scrump apples, his early discoveries of music along with his friend the drummer Tony Oxley, who remembers that he "enjoyed life much better being a musician, a working musician, than working in the rolling mills or doing the ovens."

And throughout Watson never relaxes his strong assertion that Bailey's and Oxley's utterly original musicianship is integrally connected to their working-class origins.

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is their working-class backgrounds - combined with their unerring musicality - that gave them the confidence, not to say bloodymindedness, to claim this music as their own."

He also argues that the development of free improvisation "could only have occurred against the background of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974."

Jazz criticism has rarely been so direct and uncompromising in attributing its "brilliant practitioners with their working-class roots" and Watson consistently emphasises this theme, showing how Bailey, who in his early musical years made a living as a jobbing guitarist in dance halls and theatre pits with entertainers like Gracie Fields and Morecambe and Wise in venues from the Winter Gardens in Bournemouth to the ABC in Blackpool, threw off all of this to be a founder within the impoverished world of free improvisation.

He not only played his new music without concessions after his initial discoveries as a third of the Joseph Holbrooke Trio playing in an upstairs room of The Grapes pub in Sheffield with Oxley and bassist Gavin Bryars, but he created with very little money his own label Incus, which became a vital creative centre of the music he pioneered.

Watson spends over a century of pages discussing and analysing Bailey's annual Company weeks from 1977 to 1994, when he brought together some of the most startling amalgams of free and diverse musicians imaginable, and then issued recordings of the music they played on Incus.

He approaches these recordings with an incisive scrutiny like a literary critic anatomising successive poems.

Indeed, for Watson, the recorded output of Bailey and his bandmates is as close to great literature as it gets.

As he declares with a convincing integrity, "Bailey's discourse is authentically English and recalls the blank verse rhetoric of the Elizabethan stage, where dramatic tension is achieved by the contrast of big, loud resonant phrases and hushed intimate reflections."

Listen closely to Bailey and his colleagues' sounds from Paul Rutherford's trombone, Barry Guy's bass or John Stevens's drums and you will find that his claims in truth are anything but extravagant.

Watson's book enlarges our understanding of all sonic artistry and the humanity and life experience that flows like blood cells through its every note.

It more specifically and luminously honours the work of Bailey and his ever-searching, ever-human cohorts.

It also reminds me that I first heard Bailey and his primal guitar in 1975 at a Moving Left Show concert at the Round House, an ex-railway workers' plant in Chalk Farm, London - a benefit for the Communist Party.

Watson's conclusion is that these sounds are part of "the socialist revolution in music - practical, collective, anti-ideological and humanist.

"It stomps on myth and insists that music is played by people (even if not in circumstances of their own choosing)."

Listen to Bailey, read Watson's book and see what you think.