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| 7.005 Ft
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| 1. | Bai Hua She (Viper)
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| 2. | Huang Qin (Skullcap)
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| 3. | Zhu Ye (Various Species)
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| 4. | Ba Qing Ye (Woad)
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| 5. | Wan Er Wan (The Jig Is Up)
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| 6. | Xiang Qing Qing (Grains of Paradise)
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| 7. | Sha Fen (Gardens of Paradise)
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| 8. | Zhu Shu (Cinnabar)
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Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Avant-Garde / Free Improvisation
Derek Bailey - Guitar
Min Xiao-Fen - Pipa
Allan Tucker - Mastering
Ikue Mori - Design
Jim Anderson - Engineer
John Zorn - Executive Producer
Kazunori Sugiyama - Associate Producer
Min Xiao-Fen is a master player of the pipa, a four-stringed Chinese lute. In addition to recordings of traditional material (for example, the stunning Spring, River, Flower, Moon, Night, a solo recital issued on Asphodel), during the 1990s Min increasingly played with improvising musicians, including Wadada Leo Smith, George Lewis, and John Zorn. Here, she teams with the reigning master of improvised guitar, Derek Bailey, and the results, while intriguing, fail to live up to expectations. There are a couple of problems facing anyone intrepid enough to go one on one with Bailey: first, a tendency toward "me-too-ism," of merely echoing his sounds; and second, being overly deferential, content to follow Bailey's lead and not provoke him with one's own ideas. It's a bit like finding oneself in conversation with a gifted thinker and simply replying "yeah" and "uh-huh," or paraphrasing previously stated arguments. While not quite so drastic, these appear to be symptomatic of the problems on this recording. Instead of relying on her beautiful, traditional strengths, Min tries to apply Bailey-esque extended techniques to the pipa and lets him chart the course rather than exerting control herself. For his part, Bailey appears to go to great lengths in accommodating her, eliciting pipa-like sounds from his guitar as if urging her to take them and run, but only a small amount of gripping music emerges. There is certainly a good deal of delicacy in the playing, and both musicians are clearly listening to one another, but the line between delicacy and timidity is crossed a bit too often. Had Min been more resolute in creating independent structures that might have forced Bailey, consequently, to explore other more rewarding areas (as has occurred, for example, in his duets with percussionist Susie Ibarra), the music might have fulfilled its great potential. As is, the result is not unrewarding in some aspects, but is ultimately a frustrating affair. ~ Brian Olewnick, All Music Guide
Derek Bailey
Active Decades: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: Jan 29, 1930 in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England
Died: Dec 25, 2005 in London, England
Genre: Jazz
At first glance, Derek Bailey possesses almost none of the qualities one expects from a jazz musician -- his music does not swing in any appreciable way, it lacks a discernible sense of blues feeling -- yet there's a strong connection between his amelodic, arhythmic, atonal, uncategorizable free-improvisatory style, and much free jazz of the post-Coltrane era. His music draws upon a vast array of resources, including indeterminacy, rock & roll, and various world musics. Indeed, this catholic acceptance of any and all musical influences is arguably what sets Bailey's art outside the strict bounds of "jazz." The essential element of his work, however, is the type of spontaneous musical interrelation that evolved from the '60s jazz avant-garde. Sound, not ideology, is Bailey's medium. He differs in approach to almost any other guitarist who preceded him. Bailey uses the guitar as a sound-making, rather than a "music"-making, device. Meaning, he rarely plays melodies or harmonies in a conventional sense, but instead pulls out of his instrument every conceivable type of sound using every imaginable technique. His timbral range is quite broad. On electric guitar, Bailey is capable of the most gratingly harsh, distortion-laden heavy-metalisms; unamplified, he's as likely to mimic a set of windchimes. Bailey's guitar is much like John Cage's prepared piano; both innovations enhanced the respective instrument's percussive possibilities. As a group player, Bailey is an exquisitely sensitive respondent to what goes on around him. He has the sort of quick reflexes and complementary character that can meld random musical events into a unified whole.
Bailey came from a musical family; his grandfather and uncle were musicians. As a youngster living in Sheffield in the '40s, Bailey studied music with C.H.C. Biltcliffe and guitar with George Wing and John Duarte. Bailey began playing conventional jazz and commercial music professionally in the '50s. In the early '60s, Bailey played in a trio called Joseph Holbrooke, with drummer Tony Oxley and bassist (and later renowned classical composer) Gavin Bryars. In the course of its existence, from 1963-66, the group evolved from playing relatively traditional jazz with tempo and chord changes, to playing totally free. In 1966 Bailey moved to London; there, he formed a number of important musical associations with, among others, drummer John Stevens, saxophonist Evan Parker, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and bassist Dave Holland. This specific collection of players recorded as the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, which served as a crucible for the sort of egalitarian, collective improvisation that Bailey was to pursue from then on. In 1968, Bailey joined Oxley -- another musician interested in new possibilities of sound generation -- in whose sextet he remained until 1973. In 1970, Bailey formed the trio Iskra with bassist Barry Guy and trombonist Paul Rutherford. Also that year, Bailey started (with Parker and Oxley) the Incus record label, for which he would continue to record into the '90s. In 1976, Bailey founded Company, a long-lived free improv ensemble with ever-shifting personnel, which has included, at various times, Anthony Braxton, Han Bennink, Steve Lacy, and George Lewis, among others.
The 1980s saw Bailey collaborating with many of the aforementioned, along with newer figures on the scene such as John Zorn and Joelle Leandre. Solo playing has always been a particular specialty, as have (especially in recent years, it seems) ad hoc duos with a variety of associates. Bailey later recorded an uncompromising three-disc set with a group that included the usually more pop-oriented guitarist Pat Metheny. Bailey's extreme radicalism makes for a difficult music, yet there's no doubting his influence; his methods and aesthetic have significantly impacted the downtown New York free scene, though many (if not most) of his disciples are little known to the general public. In 1980, Bailey wrote Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice, an informative and undervalued volume on various traditions of improvised music.
---Chris Kelsey, All Music Guide |
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