bailey, the problematic pt. 0: preamble

This started out with my flippant remark (I should stop doing these in the semi-public sphere of a blog) which Dominic Lash rightly flagged me up on. I left that discussion with what I’ll take as a kind of mission statement for this thread:

…Although [Derek] Bailey is one of my models… I think I should flag up the problematic in (some of) his rhetoric….
…The non-engagement with (and consequent invisibility of?) the issue [of race], I think, is actually part of the problem….
One last thing before I go: I was avoiding the word ‘racist’ in this discussion. I did this not because there’s no such thing, but because it can put an hard-edged boundary between ‘the good guys’ and ‘the bad’—between ‘progressives’ and ‘reactionaries’—and that’s not really the politics I wanted to be discussing in this context.

Like many improvising guitarists, I owe Derek Bailey a great deal (my humble lexicon is a kind of transplantation), but I also find his work (his writings in particular) a problematic.
Perhaps I was being unkind to Bailey in my remarks: re-reading Improvisation (Bailey, 1992) has been a bit of a revelation—it’s not quite the troublesome book I remember. I have, however, a complex relationship with this text. On the one hand, I cite it often (including in this blog), but it is a book steeped in a certain sensibility that I intersect with but don’t wholly endorse.
Before I continue with this discussion, I want to lay down what I hope to avoid: I don’t want this to become a character assassination, nor give the impression that I am guilt-free in comparison to Bailey. I’ve been guilty of many ill-considered and/or foolish statements—remarks that make public my private prejudices—and I don’t wish to give the impression that Bailey was a unique case. I certainly do not want to single out Bailey as a sacrificial figure head—a scapegoat—for what is a broader systemic problem.
With that out of the way, I want to look specifically at the statement that opens the first Jazz chapter in Improvisation:

There is no doubt that the single most important contribution to the revitalization of improvisation in Western music in the 20th century is jazz…. But for the Western musician its greatest service was to revive something almost extinct in Occidental music: it reminded him that performing music and creating music are not necessarily separate activities and that, at its best, instrumental improvisation can achieve the highest levels of musical expression.

Ibid., p. 48.

To be continued…

references:

Bailey, Derek (1992), Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (London: British Library National Sound Archive).