Derek Bailey

Guitar player is Makoto Kawabata of Shimizu Tempu.

The drama is a kind of improvisation drama called Shoji Hano, who was a collaborator with Peter Blotsman and Derek Bailey or something like that.

Oh, cool.

Interesting.

Henry, it's great to have you on the show.

So 55 years, 300 albums, Herzog soundtracks, sessions with everyone from Derek Bailey to the Grateful Dead.

Most people would call you a guitar legend.

So before we get into any of that, how do you describe yourself?

Or maybe it just got into me from music that I listened to.

You know, one of the spooky, weird things is the first day I got a guitar, 1971, November 1st, I went back to my dorm room in college and I just tried to make sounds with a slide along with a bunch of records.

Tried to play along with a record with Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and Han Bennink, Topography of the Lungs.

[guitar playing]Later on, I played with all of them.

Yeah.

And I mean, a lot of the time, when I feel kind of distanced from some element of songwriting, I'll go back to a standard that I really like, and I'll just be like, how does it work? Like, or I'll just listen to a rendering of a standard that means something to me, like Coltrane ballads or like Derrick Bailey ballads or just whatever.

And I'll just be like, what did, what did it mean for them to rearm it this way? Because it's making me feel this.

Yeah.

Along with, uh, Kirchin's, uh, somewhat music concrete style production.

Uh, the album includes musical contributions from the likes of Derek Bailey and, uh, Evan Parker, two heavyweights of the UK free improv world.

A pretty scronky outer limits curiosity of an album, and this comes from the, uh, 2019 reissue on Trunk Records, which has issued all sorts of Kirchin's music, including his soundtrack work and, uh, other unreleased recordings.

And what you're hearing is an excerpt of Part Two: The Human Element.

open question.

I have yeah I got one thing which specifically I was listening back I was being very studious and I was listening back two episodes ago to the uh the birthday episode specifically mega section talking about like immediacy in the context of hip-hop um I think that this actually ties into that very well in the sense that it's like I think a key part of this idea of extended technique because I you know uh the idea of like you know comparing it to someone like um Derrick Bailey, the way that he played guitar and explored all the weird tonalities of guitar, and comparing that to voice and rap styling.

I think part of that is, in its sense, the ability to play, the ability to get weird with it and try out shit which was not previously considered, but which comes back through the idea of exploration.

And I think that part of it is the sense that Because of a lot of shit which affects like every aspect of music, particularly like the way that streaming services work, the way that self-tagging works, the idea that you have to make your music a marketable product if you want people to hear it, I think people are kind of forced to fit their rapping in particular, the way that they approach delivery and flow and lyric content into boxes which already exist.

Right.

And I was like, yeah, well, yeah, but you should, you should really listen to James Blood Ulmer and Henry and like, you know, Derek Bailey and these people, you know, it's like, so I was turning them all this stuff.

So they tired me to do these nights and, It's actually called Extra Weeks.

And it was a listening.

[on-hold jazz music]That was "Nemesis", from Dave Holland's quartet album "Extensions".

One of Dave Holland's most remarkable qualities is his ability to adapt to the most diverse musical situations while remaining immediately recognizable in every context: from playing folk and bluegrass with Norman Blake or Chris Smither to blues rock with Bonnie Raitt, from free improvisation with Derek Bailey to bebop and mainstream jazz, as we'll hear in this set featuring a couple of albums with exquisite piano players.

We will start with his collaboration with Hank Jones, with Billy Higgins on drums, focusing on a Hank Jones composition that has become a staple in Dave Holland's repertoire: "The Oracle", from a 1990 Hank Jones album of the same title.

After that, another album released that same year: Don Graulnick's "Weaver of Dreams", from which we will hear one of Graulnick's classics: "Nothing Personal".