In a strange way, it’s easy to underestimate Derek Bailey’s importance. Many of us, especially on this side of the pond, know Bailey, who passed away on Christmas at 75, as simply a wildly inventive guitarist. To his compatriots, though, he was a much more central figure to the free-improvised music that began bubbling up in England in the late ’60s. His earliest free groups—the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and the Music Improvisation Company—were huge umbrella organizations under which basically any improviser who happened to be in the area could interact with like-minded musicians. Some of these early collaborators are now guiding lights in the field, like Gavin Bryars (though technically not as an improviser), Evan Parker, and Dave Holland; AMM began to experiment with a similar alchemy around this time as well, and they too were invited to come play with or alongside the SME. When Bailey began his Company in 1976—another rotating cast that put on annual week-long improv-fests of interchanging small and large groups—he continued to not just contribute as a musician, but also act as a sort of patron. Naturally, there he also edited a dedicated magazine, Musics, and a label, Incus, that he co-founded with Parker and longtime friend and fellow-traveller Tony Oxley, which survives still, well past 100 releases to date. While it’s stranger still to celebrate a wildly inventive guitarist for his organizational skills, it’s easy to imagine that, were he a less able manager, a lot of that music would be lost to most of us.

His earliest years in groups now seem embryonic, just skeletal beginnings of where his sound would go. These were musicians trying to approach a music without traditional idiom, though many of these players, Bailey included, were coming from jazz backgrounds, and that comes through especially strongly in those early large-group numbers. As with much large-group improvisation, the more bombastic players tend to drown out everything else, and Bailey’s light-touch picking and plucking rarely survives the carnage. In smaller groups, however, and particularly duos, Bailey could shine as a preternaturally astute improviser; listen here (in another recording from the same 1970 Gernan radio broadcast as above) as he and bassist Dave Holland run concentric rings around each other while never deigning to approach a conventional melody. When I said “a music without traditional idiom” before, that’s what I meant; a music as stripped of the usual vernacular of harmony, melody, or rhythm as possible—by now, of course, this sort of improvisation has become kind of its own idiom. In an interview, Bailey called it a music whose “roots are in occasion rather than place.” (He also wrote a book on the subject, that was later adapted for a BBC documentary mini-series.) There’s a classic recording of a London concert (The London Concert, considered a historic document of this time, Incus 16) with Evan Parker on sax, in which not only are the players wholly attuned throughout, but you can hear points where the heavy-skronk-happy Parker seems cowed by Bailey’s hypnotic picking into all but imitating the sounds coming from his partner.

But as time went on, Bailey’s own highly original and very specific language on the guitar became clear. Though he still continued to play in groups (with the usual suspects, as well as folks like John Zorn and Japanese terror-proggers Ruins, and even Butoh dancer Min Tanaka), his solo work was the real showcase for that language I don’t use the word “language” lightly; Bailey himself was entirely cognizant of the idea that improvised music like this could resemble everyday speech in a way, and his own seemed to develop in the same manner as an infant first learning to talk. His first solo album (Solo Guitar, Vol. 1, Incus 10) is filled with short passages of relative simplicity—one note at a time, repeated patterns interrupted by a-melodious tones and carried on from there. By the aughts, that language had refined into something not only more complicated, but wholly uncategorizable. His 2002 album Ballads is probably the apotheosis of his solo work, with not just a more varied vocabulary and complex structures, but a decidedly more sensitive, wise, poetic voice. The old patterns are all but gone, and he’s almost embraced melody, beginning a line on a recognizable set of notes, before taking the first opportunity for a bracing left turn, creating an ever-evolving sound full of constant surprises. By the end of his life, he’d developed carpal tunnel syndrome, along with the motor-neurological disorder that took him, and he could no longer grip his plectrum. Many people would perhaps go gently, and Bailey did have to stop playing live, but he didn’t stop playing. Instead, he simply maneuvered and all but retaught himself to use his instrument. The ensuing album—Carpal Tunnel, released only a few months before his death—is equal parts haunting and exhilarating; he isn’t hitting those strings with the force he once did, but this revamped language still reflects the old one, in sometimes wild ways. No longer do we get the long, unfurled ribbons of notes, but a meditative calm, even when his new style of playing ends up sounding like no acoustic guitar is ever supposed to, and filigreed with silence, as if he’s leaving all those old intermediary sounds out to focus simply on the ones that matter most. But what’s one more invention, when you’ve left so many behind.

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