Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation

This brilliant biography of the cult guitar player will likely cause you to abandon everything you thought you knew about jazz improvisation post-punk and the avant-garde. Derek Bailey was at the top of his profession as a dance band and record-session guitarist when in the early 1960s he began playing an uncompromisingly abstract form of music. Today his anti-idiom of “Free Improvisation” has become the lingua franca of the “avant” scene with Pat Metheny John Zorn David Sylvian and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore among his admirers.