Improvising The Future: Why We Should Listen To Derek Bailey's 'Domestic Jungle'

Improvisation, Electronica, and Sheffield's finest

Unless you are Stewart Lee on Celebrity Mastermind, the name Derek Bailey probably means very little to you. The Sheffield born guitarist, documentarian, and writer, who passed away in 2005, left behind a body of work consisting of 116 albums over a period of 55 years. He worked alongside such notable post-war musical luminaries as John Zorn, Thurston Moore, and Cecil Taylor and much of his influence has seeped into that of more eclectic contemporary popular artists such as Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu, to name just a few. And yet, Bailey remains a complete outsider, uncelebrated in even his home county despite ranking amongst the upper-echelon of artists produced by Yorkshire in the 20th century. I do not intend to start a discussion as to why Derek Bailey remains unrecognised by mainstream musical culture, the reasons why this is the case is apparent to anyone after five seconds of listening regardless of the listener’s musical knowledge prior to encountering it.

Derek Bailey’s chosen field of music is free-improvisation. Free-improvisation is so fundamental to the very being of Bailey, the man, that it consumes, not only, his musical output, but it is also his published work ‘Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music’ (1993) and his 4-hour mini-series documentary produced for Channel 4 entitled ‘On the Edge - Improvisation in Music’. Improvisation, in music, is a tricky thing to pin down. On the one hand, it conjures up images of players ‘making up’ their parts ‘on the spot’, which is an insufficient descriptor because it implies a lack of thought and intent behind what is being played, robbing the musician of their agency and the due credit they deserve. However, most music that is improvised is doing so within formal boundaries. When Charlie Parker solos over ‘Just Friends’ we feel the exhilaration and the danger of a performance which feels as though it could truly go anywhere, but which is actually existing within the chord structure of that song. The same goes for other genres such as the Blues, where the 12-bar structure is sacrosanct, or contemporary ‘jam bands’ (Grateful Dead, Dave Matthews Band, Phish) who improvise around well rehearsed ideas which allow them to return to pre-determined points within the popular song form.

While many will associate improvisation with 20th century music, in particular the styles which seem to be reacting in some way to the rigidity of western music prior to 1900, it is a technique which has existed in some form everywhere humans have tried to make music. The standard historical tale is simply that improvisation emerges in the traditional music of the Sufi people of the Indian sub-continent, and is then brought into Europe through the Middle-East and North African countries, most notably on the back of the nomadic Romani people’s arrival in Andalusia, Spain. In fact, if one listens attentively they will find a number of similarities between the music played by the Sufi people, Flamenco, and the Kathak dancers of Urtar Pradesh, all of which are at least semi-improvised forms. While this is happening on the European theatre, improvisation enters into the Americas through the arrival of West African slaves into the American South. West African music’s approach is quite alien to the Western ear, because unlike Western music which has a very scientific approach to tonality (the 12-note pure scale) or India’s playful use of microtonality (the frequencies between two notes on a piano), West African music doesn’t necessarily place a value on the clean note. Instruments such as the Balafon and the Fula Tambin contain all of these overtones that someone classically trained in Western tonality would (wrongly) dismiss offhand. In fact, there are a number of stories of anthropologists providing tribal musicians with concert flutes and the musicians adding their own hums and distortion on the top of the sound, blurring the lines between the note being played and the actual sound produced. On three continents we then have two strands of folk music which are experimenting tonally (in Europe and Asia) and one is playing with unconventional timbres (in the Americas), and all of these cultures are on the cutting edge of rhythmical complexity in a way that someone only used to 4/4 pop beats, 6/8 jigs, and 3/4 waltzes struggle to comprehend. In America, the West African tribal ideas eventually begin to integrate with popular music forms like ragtime and the European-mindedness of the Creole community. African textural and rhythmic ideas breed with Western classical complexity and the arrangement and form of the popular song, giving birth to what we now know as jazz, best exemplified in this early form in the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings lead by Louis Armstrong in the early 1920s. In Europe, around the same time, composers like Arnold Schoenberg come and attempt to dissolve the Western tonal scale. Those composers, looking back at what came before, come to the conclusion that we had gone as far as we could go with all of that and, in order to fight against the reduction of classical music into a museum piece, we need do away with tonality. Once those structures are gone we begin to see a more open approach to what music can be once these kinds of sounds which have always been in the folk tradition begin to be intellectualised by the music intelligentsia. And with the invention of recorded music these radical progressions are disseminated and begin to cross fertilise yet again. Jazz, as it develops into be-bop, begins to take Western harmonic rules and stretches them to seeming breaking point with complex chords, key changes, and the skill then becomes a game of who has the fastest, most technical solo chops. Be-bop is then influencing Igor Stravinsky, who is influencing John Coltrane, and so on, until in the 1960s there’s a great sense that we’ve broken through to something. In 1952, John Cage takes the Thelonius Monk maxim ‘everything that happens in the room is the show’ maxim to its logical endpoint with 4.33. Ornette Coleman releases The Shape of Jazz To Come in 1959, with the intention of liberating the melody through improvisation in the same way that Schoenberg had done to harmony some the 35 years ago.

Born in 1930, this is the environment Derek Bailey was coming of age in. By the early 60s, the guitarist had played his way through Britain’s music-hall, session playing, and jazz combo scenes and became deeply dissatisfied, drifting further and further towards the so-called ‘free-jazz’ of Coleman and late-era Coltrane. Moving to London in 1966, Bailey joined the Spontaneous Music Ensemble alongside saxophonist: Evan Parker, trumpeter: Kenny Wheeler, bassist: Dave Holland, and drummer: John Stevens. The album this lineup produced together: Karyōbin (1977, Island Records) is probably the most accessible album for fans of free-jazz to crossover into the new world about to be born: the world of free-improvisation.

Free improvisation pushes further and further against those boundaries, experimenting not only tonally and harmonically, but also integrate non-standard methods of play and approaches to the way in which ensembles are arranged and conducted. Every musician who takes part in free-improvisation brings a completely unique approach to the task, this is the point of the whole endeavour. What, and this cannot be stressed enough, free-improvisation is not is thoughtless. It may sound as though this is what music would be if you left a school class of year 8s loose in an instrument room, but it would be a complete discredit to some of our most creative and talented artists to ignore the incredible technique and skill required to create compelling music in this manner. The reason I said I believed Karyōbin is a good introduction to Bailey’s work is because there is fundamentally a sense that, through all the chaos, there is something resembling a band playing for one another in an abstract way. You can feel the shared goal of the ensemble even if it’s often unclear what that goal is. In all honestly, I could see someone who is a fan of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, or the Velvet Underground/John Cale really appreciating what the Spontaneous Music Ensemble is doing on that particular record.

Which leads us to Domestic Jungle (2022), the album that I’ve been listening to for the last two days. Domestic Jungle is a compilation (in two parts, the other released separately as Domestic Jungle DAT) of rehearsal tapes Bailey made in the 1990s around the time he began working on what would become the Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass collaboration with DJ Ninj in 1996. Derek Bailey, in his mid 60s, became fascinated with pirate drum and bass radio stations. By that, I don’t necessarily mean that he was obsessed only with D&B musically, no, but with the whole aesthetics of the D&B pirate station. At some point Bailey begins to record himself improvising over the top of one of these stations with a small DAT recorder and the results are a breathtaking blend of this completely synthetic pastiche music and guitar playing which is supposed to be a completely human expression. The interaction of these two intensely harsh musical forms, one digital, and one analogue, intercut with radio-DJ chit-chat and DnBs penchant for ridiculous vocal and orchestral sample, creates a confused and dissonant vision of the future. One which I think is necessary to hear for the curious listener in 2023. In a world which is drifting towards technocracy and with the looming threat of AI lurking on the horizon for many artists, it’s exhilarating to be in contact with something that feels like its in conversation with the very idea of assimilation into a technological form. Bailey is playing an arch-top acoustic guitar, without a pickup, and is playing mostly using pinch harmonics and the natural distortion that creates and he’s super-imposing this over the top of programmed drum beats and sampled phrases which were intended for the nightclub. One would think, possibly, that Bailey is using the electronic music as a means of returning to some kind of musical boundary, and in some sense it does provide some structure (it gives the piece a definitive beginning and end) but it’s much more conversational than the idea necessarily sounds. Bailey is not adding a guitar track to a DnB piece, he’s bursting a guitar part through the chest of electronic music radio. It’s as if he’s saying that, in the heart of the most technologically precise and rigid of all music, there is a opportunity to shred the artifice and connect back to the primal musical tendencies that have been a part of the human experience for thousands of years. There is such a sound of dissatisfaction and anger in the performance to my ears that I can’t help but place it, in my mind, on some kind of spectrum alongside Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997), Kid A (2000), and JG Ballard’s High Rise (1975). Violence and anger towards the machine, in awe of its possibility, but in fear of its cruelty. An elegant knife-fight dance between man’s most liberate expression and its most rigid.

As guitar and beat and deranged DJ babble fade in and out with one another I find myself more and more aware of the fact that we’re dealing an improviser working with randomly assigned technological frameworks. What this interaction does is create a music which can’t be assimilated into any kind of stratified system of music listening. An AI could not interpret and recreate anything remotely close to Domestic Jungle because what Domestic Jungle is is live improvised performance being informed by a second live performance made up of elements which are completely unknown to the improvisor. It’s not logged by any shared recorded history. This is music that is entirely about the process. It is emphatically about the joy of sitting down and working out how all of this interacts as it is interacting and dissipating into ephemera. In a world where tech companies are telling us that they can develop tools to eliminate the process of working (notice how ChatGPT is sold as a way of cutting out the writing part of any task), Derek Bailey is saying that the real excitement of music is in the process of creating it and in the kinds of extremities you can push the process to. Music in this mould is a voyage of discovery rather than a means of arriving at a destination and it is adamant that this is where the real visceral joy of music performance actually is. It is the kind of madness that only a human being could really create. For all of its anger, its challenge, and its strangeness, Domestic Jungle tells the story of a man reaching out with his guitar to another human communicating through beats, in an attempt to return to some Balafon/Kora circle in West Africa at the very dawn of man. On Domestic Jungle, Derek Bailey isn’t creating some generational opposition between the jazz age and the electronic age, but I believe he is challenging the electronic age to understand its connection to an all-together human historical lineage. Free-improvisation, in liberating the musician from any debt to genre or any traditional methods of sound production, provides the scope for aesthetic conversations beyond commodification and beyond the kind of ironies which are embedded within popular music. I understand that this is not music for everyone, but I assure you that there is no trick or gimmick to Derek Bailey. No, this is not music your five year old could make. This is music that, on the very simplest level, dares to ask questions of social alienation, technological anxiety, and whether the programmed and collaged aesthetics of electronica are capable of emotional complexity beyond their immediate base joys.

There is, in every human being - in every human culture - to take pre-existing frameworks and impose on them a personal identity. The desire to improvise exists in every person and it is only through (often brutally enforced) structures that this instinct is suppressed. In a world where everything is commodified, where algorithms have your entire personality mapped out so they can sell you knick knacks, become unpredictable. The music of the Sufis, the West Africans, the Roma, Louis Armstrong, Ornette Coleman, Derek Bailey, lives and will continue to live because it breathes with a human desire for wonder. Challenge yourself and continue to do so until you die because without any kind of social deviance we’d all still be living in fucking caves.

R. T. Sweeney (@CautiousCrip)

Domestic Jungle:

Karyōbin - Spontaneous Music Ensemble: