Best 17 quotes of Derek Bailey on MyQuotes

But that methodology where players are pitted against other unfamiliar players has been so widely adapted now that anybody plays with everybody.

Charlie Appleyard can be anybody; but Ive used him sometimes in chat pieces, and these are all chat pieces about the history of Charlie Appleyard.

Diversity is its most consistent characteristic....The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it.

For me, Company is still the best way for me to work.

Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone - beginners, children, and non-musicians.

Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone-beginners, children, and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is available. Its accessibility to the performer is, in fact, something which appears to offend both its supporters and detractors....And as regards method, the improvisor employs the oldest in music-making...Mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation.

If you could only play a record once, imagine the intensity you’d have to bring into the listening.

I like duos with percussionists. I like the songs that percussionists sing.

I'm not much into current electronic stuff, what I think of as lounge electronics, mumbling electronics.

In fact its quite gratifying for me to see some of the people who really objected to this method of working now being quite so profligate in their use of it.

In the absence of that, I am happy to play solo, but I don't think there is any comparison.

I think playing solo is a second rate activity, really. For me, playing is about playing with other people.

I think the blues is fine for blues players, but free blues has never made much sense to me.

I wouldn't want to be ideological about it but I think of it as being the best way to approach this kind of playing. I don't think it works in other music, other kinds of playing.

Playing music is not really susceptible to theory much. Circumstances affect it so much.

Undeniably, the audience for improvisation, good or bad, active or passive, sympathetic or hostile, has a power that no other audience has. It can affect the creation of that which is being witnessed. And perhaps because of that possibility the audience for improvisation has a degree of intimacy with the music that is not achieved in any other situation.

Younger players in this music often turn out to be middle aged; it is not a young music.