Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
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6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Derek Bailey
Ballads
(Tzadik, 2002)
Brushing the soft fur of the jazz ballad the wrong way, with a wire brush.
Arhythmic, atonal, noisy and free, Derek Bailey existed so far outside the bounds of regular jazz, that he doubtlessly would have been miffed to be included in any list of great jazz albums. Playing since the 1950s, this Sheffield-born guitarist moved to London in 1966 where he played in various improv collectives with the likes of Tony Oxley, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy and George Lewis. An original idea of Tzadik label owner John Zorn, Ballads was, in conception, pure science-lab experiment, getting the ultimate spontaneous guitar improv iconoclast to play such sugary jazz standards as Laura, You Go To My Head and When Your Lover Has Gone and standing well back, with some protective goggles on. Given the liner-notes aside that Bailey went to the trouble of finding a guitar that was "totally inappropriate for playing standards", and the fact that this is Bailey's (un)usual approach to jazz guitar, the results should scar and burn but they do anything but. Bailey started out playing standards in small jazz groups in the '50s and Ballads stands as the jazz equivalent of Krapp's Last Tape, the sound of a man unpicking the warp and weft of his romantic past, pulling dissonance out of the beauty, and vice versa. The result is a spikily beautiful thing and the ideal starting point for anyone hoping to force themselves into the knotty briar that surrounds the mysterious edifice of free jazz.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 23/04/2009
Further Listening
Derek Bailey – Standards (Tzadik, 2007)
John Coltrane – My Favourite Things (Atlantic, 1961)
Evan Parker – With Birds (Treader, 2005)
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