Derek Bailey RIP

Hello again David. Happy New Year. This just to say thanks for your touching and informative Derek Bailey obituary in Wire. I had no idea that the great man had died. How right you are foregrounding Bailey's overtly tactile, almost common sense, kind of no frills, playing method - "...fingers, strings, and wood...". That robust, unfettered physicality certainly franchised Bailey's staunch personal application to free improv, and of a radically-defined and singular kind, which marked him out as a true original. No question in my mind. For no real or useful reason, Bailey has always reminded me of Fripp, but without the bunkum, and without the bemusing tangents in career path and conceptual concern. These, in Fripp, always look a bit like dilettantism, at one end, and the product of boredom, at the other. In contrast, Bailey's clarity, pedantry even, appears awesome - of course awesome as a body of work, but awesome also as existential commitment; a deep modernity against a tepid sea of inch-deep postmodernist dalliance. Thanks for capturing something of the man's power, and so tenderly, yet unsentimentally. Best wishes, Anthony