Derek Bailey

Many if not most of Derek Bailey's fans (I was going to write "hardcore fans," but aren't we all?) will be surprised at the existence of these extremely early solo recordings, originally issued by Incus back in 1973. Even for a label as unorthodox as Incus, the TAPS represented a unique but very short-lived experiment in "marketing"; basically, Derek decided that it would be interesting, cheaper, and "less formal" to issue some of his favorite recent solo improvisations in a reel-to-reel format, one at a time; custom made, so to speak: "just copy them if somebody wanted to buy one". Each copy was made on 1/4" tape on a 3" reel, and came in its own 3-1/2" square box. (Needless to say, these limited edition originals are virtually unobtainable today.)

This long-overdue reissue of the Incus TAPS onto CD fills a major hole in the recorded catalogue of Derek's work and captures (now forever) a sadly under documented early period in the development of one of the most original, total reinventions of a major musical instrument of this century. The TAPS represent an early highpoint of Derek's solo guitar music, a flowering of innovation that followed a period (1970-71) of concentration on "building up an atonal language", as he put it to Melody Maker in 1973 (as, as he summed it up in his 1980/92 book Improvisation: It's nature and Practice in Music: "I wanted to know if the language I was using was complete, if it could supply everything I wanted in a musical performance. The ideal way of doing this... was through a period of solo playing".

Indeed, it is quite a leap from the small, pointillistic "miniatures" heard on Derek's first solo record, Incus 2 (1971), (revolutionary as that record was and is), to the full-throttle tours de force of continuous invention unleashed here, two years later. The unprecedented, shocking newness of Bailey's arsenal of rattling discourse had some writers for the local music press grasping for words to convey what was happening under the noses of glitter-rock obsessed London: "Derek Bailey is without doubt the most original guitarist I've ever heard... his playing is such a giant step forward that it's almost impossible to detect any early influences at all" (Ken Hyder, 1973). Or this: "There are just a handful of sounds in the world which appear as prophecies for the distant future of music. Some of these are Nico's 'Marble Index' album, Terry Riley's 'In C', and practically everything played by Derek Bailey" (Richard Williams, 1971). "Bailey is as close to a musical genius as any I know" (Michael Walters).

Early descriptions of him as a "post-Webern improvisor" correctly cited one of Derek's acknowledged influences as well as the real parallels between the two men's largely self-created musical languages - radical atonality and extreme compression of musical statement, tone clusters and mixed extremes of timbre - in a foreign word, Klangfarbenmelodie - though in reality, of course, they don't sound like each other (in fact, of the two, I'd rather listen to Derek's percussive, gut-level barrel of sounds any day).

Maybe it's fitting that, like all of Webern, these early improvisations are short; you might laugh, but as someone who has hummed his favorite Bailey passages for years, I find an almost song-like, or at least compositional quality in some of these pieces (TAP 1 comes to mind first). Naturally, the climactic second half of TAP 3-a brings to mind a similar unified passage that occurs halfway through his solo record of the following year, Lot 74 (though the music on that album, at least the first side, sounds literally soft-pedalled almost from start to finish), but has a breathtaking dramatic intensity, foreshadowing the equally mind-blowing single-note concentrations/assaults on that other extreme Bailey rarity, the privately issued cassette Music and Dance (1980).

TAPS 4 are among Derek's earliest solo pieces of the loosen-up-the-bass-strings variety, and are better than food.

I guess you could say I like this music. Praise to the Cortical Foundation for reviving TAPS and making them permanent. I think they'll outlast TV, quite frankly.