the of mirror eye

* Derek Bailey: Tap 3 a (7.5 mb) | Tap 3 b (8.5 mb)
From Incus Taps : Organ Of Corti : Corti 10

* Iskra 1903: Improvisation 9 (5.5 mb)
From Chapter One 1970-1972 : Emanem : 4301

I just found out that Mr. Derek Bailey died on Christmas Day, 2005. He was an iconoclast and a guitarist extraordinaire who spent over 40 years deconstructing the guitar and exploring the instrument. He has a very distinctive playing style which, for the most part, eschews any sort of melody, harmony and rhythm. Instead, he built up a pointillistic, atonal language that he spent his lifetime working on. He also started one of the first independent labels owned by musicians and an extrememly influential jazz magazine.

I’ll be perfectly honest when I say that this music is not for most people. In fact, it’s not even for me, all of the time, as this is very difficult music to listen to. But there are times when his music fits my mood perfectly. When I can lose myself in his playing and absorb it without analyzing it.

I’ve decided to include a couple of solo pieces and one group improv. The solo pieces come from early in his career and are mind blowing.

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”.

(from the liner notes)

The group playing is also from an early time period and represents their desire to form a percussionless trio. The line up is rather unique with trombone, guitar and double bass.

As I said before, this music can be quite challenging to listen to. But I feel that it is well worth the effort. The imagination and group conversations that are presented here are simply amazing.

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