Derek Bailey interview (part 2-3)

In Derek Bailey's hallway and elsewhere throughout his home, there are stacks of boxes containing CDs ready to be mailed out if required. Like many independent labels, Incus Records has run as a cottage industry for decades. Recently, this aspect of the operation was emphasised by the release of two CD-Rs, Chats and The Appleyard File, available only from Incus. Both feature lo-fi, home taped pieces that mix guitar and speech from Bailey, often recorded as audio letters to friends and associates. In this second part of the interview, Derek Bailey talks about these releases, plus Taps, the curse of Joseph Holbrooke and about other related matters.

AAJ: What prompted you to release these CD-Rs?

DB: I've been doing these for decades. I've done hundreds of them. But I don't have copies of most of them. I enjoy doing it, and it gets me playing. Playing and talking has got a certain interest for me. It doesn't matter what I'm talking about, that is more or less irrelevant, for instance, the Fred Frith thing [on Chats] about the rain. As a means of communication, I just like to do them. Of all the things on Chats, most of them started off as one-of-one CD-Rs. Before that technology, I used to record on DAT and then make a cassette copy and send it. That is how I come to have copies. Before that, I used to record onto a cassette and send it, so I didn't have a copy. I've got copies of one or two, or sometimes I'd make two versions.

I've never got around to putting them out before apart from an occasional one on record. Martin Davidson [of Emanem] put out a CD of audio letters I sent to him when he was in Australia in the 1970s. On Playbacks there is a chat piece, but that is different because I don't play on it, just talk. The first chat piece I put out was in 1973 on a solo record called Lot 74 that has been out of print for years. They were never intended to be put together. There are lots out there. I still send them out and don't keep copies. I do about one a week, so there are hundreds of the buggers out there. I've sent three in the last month, and two I don't have copies of, because I recorded them straight onto cassette. When I put Chats together, there were 21 of them, which I thought was a bit too much. [The final version has 13 tracks.]

I have always been attracted to the cottage industry side of this business. To make it work economically is not easy. But I can start upstairs [in his studio] and record it, then come down here [to his computer] and put it on a CD-R. I can sometimes get [his partner] Karen to do a little package, because she does the artwork, and then I send it to somebody. I take great satisfaction from it; and it has nothing to do with the whole music wrapping thing. I've always enjoyed that. I've done a lot of it this summer.

The other one, the whole Charlie Appleyard thing is just personal stuff. You'd have to hear it. There are about ten people in the world who know who Charlie Appleyard is. There is no Charlie Appleyard, butIt was satisfying doing those things. I also get to record quite a bit here [at home]. People come to visit, partly because of Karen's cooking which is widely admired. For instance, J D Perang, the New York flute and saxophone player, who was part of the St Louis equivalent of the Chicago AACM, he's a friend of George Lewis. He was in London recently and he wanted to come over for a chat, and I said, "Yes, come up but bring something, an instrument." Then we would just record ten or twenty minutes, longer if it's going OK. I've got lots of those, I thought I might make a CD out of that, if they all agreed and didn't want huge fees. But I like working here. I worked in London a lot this year, usually depping for someone else. I've done three deps in the last couple of months, which is a bit odd because I would work on average about once a year in London. For me, I either work here [at home] or I go to the airport. I don't like travelling, but I do most of my playing in other places. I'll go somewhere if there is the chance of staying for a week or two and doing some playing. That's why New York is very attractive to me, because that's a town where you can do that, go and work for a couple of weeks without having to shoot off somewhere doing overnight gigs, which has become really unattractive.

AAJ: You're keeping the CD-Rs very low key, very cottage industry.

DB: We couldn't handle it otherwise. If a distributor said that they wanted fifty, I'd have to sit at this computer burning fifty of them individually, and Karen would have to do the covers. It is OK because we get a dribble, more or less every day somebody from somewhere seems to want one, by e-mail, and I knock one off. I think it will die down. The first time I did anything like that, again in the early 70s, was when I put out these reel-to-reel tapes in little boxes. I used to make them and sell them for 60p. There was a bit of interest, and that was done just on word of mouth. That was OK, that was how it was supposed to be, but then it died away and disappeared. Then I did the same thing with cassettes some years later, at the beginning of the 80s. It is funny how they rear their heads later. For instance, Taps, the reel-to-reel tapes have come out on a CD from Cortical Foundation.

AAJ: And on vinyl as well.

DB: So at the same time I'm doing these CD-Rs, this box of hugely expensive vinyl turns up. In the shops they are selling for about £25. It's heavy vinyl, very posh. But they have reproduced the original artwork so it still says "60p" on the front. It seems ironic that at the same time as I'm knocking out these CD-Rs, there is a bunch of super produced expensive things that derive from the same kind of thing twenty or thirty years ago.

AAJ: So, in twenty years, will Chats be on 200gram vinyl? Funny old world, isn't it.

DB: It's like the empire strikes back, isn't it? You think you can get away with this? Well you can't! When the guy who put out Taps first rang me up and said he'd like to put out these things, I said that would be nice, because he was waving quite a lot of dollars around. I hadn't listened to them for decades. But I said I didn't have the masters of them. And he said that he had them. You get these enthusiasts here and there.

Anyway, when this guy, Gary Todd, was putting Taps out, he said he would also like to organise a concert for the group Joseph Holbrooke that I used to play in with Gavin Bryars and Tony Oxley. I said that we hadn't played together for thirty-six years. I don't think Tony and Gavin had even spoken together in thirty-six years. Certainly the three of us had never been in the same place during that period. So I said I didn't know if it was possible. I gave him their addresses and he organised it. The concert was going to be in LA. We were meant to go out there, do a concert and make a recording. It was all set up and very handsomely rewarded. I was in New York, and I got sick. Gavin was in Hong Kong and got sick. So the only person who could go was Tony, who was with me in New York at the time. So Tony went and played with Fred Frith, out there. So that didn't work. But this guy has always had this …I don't know if it is right to call it an obsession with Joseph Holbrooke. The name comes from an old English composer, late nineteenth, early twentieth century. When I first heard from this guy, Gary Todd, he said he'd got some records by Joseph Holbrooke. And I said there aren't any, we never made any. It turned out he was talking about the original Joseph Holbrooke. So it was all a bit weird. Then, because that LA thing fell through, we recorded over here for him and did actually get together. The idea was Gary's, but we got together for Tony Oxley's sixtieth birthday and did a concert in Cologne. So we'd actually done that. A strange reincarnation after thirty-eight years. It was kind of interesting play, I have to say. I guess that's the kind of thing you can only do once, have a thirty-eight year gap.

AAJ: I thought you'd said that the next time would be on your hundredth birthday.

DB: That's right, we're saving that. So shortly after that, Gary Todd came over here and we did three days recording for him. Two records. Now he has got that. But he has had a serious accident; fell out of a third storey window at 5-30am. I don't know who is handling it now. The guy has been advertising the records. There has always been something weird about trying to revive that group. One of the nights at Moat studio, we were having a sort of party and somebody let off a fire extinguisher. And in studios, the fire extinguishers are full of sand, so it was like being in a sandstorm. You couldn't see anything. We all got out of the studio. And when it settled down and we went back in, which took a hell of a long time, all the food and drink were covered in a layer of sand. It seems there is some.well let's not get into that boogly stuff. We did a concert earlier this year in Antwerp. That was recorded, but we can't get the tape.

AAJ: You did put out that single of the original Joseph Holbrooke from 1965, which was interesting because of how surprisingly conventional it sounded.

DB: I like it. Well that is the only recording from that time that I'm aware of. I've got a feeling there's another one that Tony has got, I'm not sure. But the only one I'm aware of is of that afternoon, it was a rehearsal and there is about an hour or so of music. But I thought that piece [on the single] was most revealing of how we were. All the other pieces are more like rehearsals. The other pieces are OK but they don't demonstrate what I think we were trying to get at as well as that does.

AAJ: Will the rest of it ever see the light of day?

DB: There is another tape where we are playing with Lee Konitz. People want to put that out, but it is terrible.

AAJ: Terrible in what sense?

DB: It was a Lee gig, just conventional jazz. This was the beginning of 1966. We were playing almost entirely free most of the time. I think it's terrible because I don't think the music is any good. But we did play some good gigs with Lee, because we did a little tour. But this one I don't think is any good. Mind you, I've not heard it in years. As I remember, the only good playing on it is from Tony. Lee doesn't play too well for him, and me and Gavin don't play anything at all. Well, I don't like my playing. There has been pressure from various quarters to put it out, but I don't find that interesting. Some of this other rehearsal stuff is musically better, but then there is not a lot of point in it.

AAJ: Of historical interest only?

DB: There is maybe one piece that has some musical interest. But people do ask about it. Zorn wanted to put some of it out. It would be easy enough to get it out, but I don't think there is any reasonable justification. There is a lot of old stuff that comes out, and it is kind of like gossip, musical gossip. There were very good reasons for not putting them out in the first place. If it was any good, you would have put it out.