ECA [1992] by Derek Bailey

Derek Bailey guitar


Notes on Derek Bailey

As a painting student in the 1960s at Edinburgh College of Art, I helped to organise a three day event of improvised music in 1969 at the ECA College Club - inviting the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Trevor Watts, Barry Guy and John Stevens), the Instant Composer’s Pool (Peter Brötzmann, Buschi Niebergall and Han Bennink) plus Paul Rutherford’s ‘Iskra’ and Johnny Dyani. The musicians in the end shared roles, and it became a forerunner of Derek’s idea for ‘Company’, which he curated over many years, inviting players of sometimes very different musical backgrounds to explore improvisation with each other in occasionally unorthodox groups. To stage the concerts, we raided the entire SRC funds for that year, and Derek admitted afterwards that (having personally pleaded with the college secretary for more money) it was his best paid gig.
Later, on becoming a lecturer in painting at the college, I organised three more concerts of improvised music at ECA. The first was Derek, who played in the College Lecture Theatre, talking to students about improvisation. Later that evening he played a solo concert in the student club - the Wee Red Bar - where this recently discovered audience recording was made.

Derek and I remained good friends - I frequently stopped in Downs Road in London and he too stayed with me in Edinburgh. In 1981, I shared a flat with him in Soho New York for two weeks while he was busy organising gigs at ‘The Knitting Factory' and elsewhere. I once ‘had an exhibition’ with Derek playing at the Vortex in 1997 - Derek played, the lights went out, all was dark, and nobody saw anything.
In Derek’s book on Improvisation, there is a fleeting reference to Gaelic Psalm singing and when Channel Four commissioned the four part series ‘On the Edge’, Derek asked me if I’d be ‘locations manager’ for Lewis and Harris in the Western Isles. Of course, I agreed and met Derek with the film director Jeremy Marre at Glasgow Airport a day before the film crew arrived. We flew to Stornoway and hired a car to drive down to Harris. As conversation, on a single track road, I said to Jeremy "This is must be a bit different from driving down Kensington High Street?"... "Well, no, last week in fact I was following nomadic camel herders in Inner Mongolia". Derek leant forwards from the back seat and offered the classic “You know they say that travel broadens the mind... does it fuck" (in his Sheffield brogue).

I remember him saying (in 1969, at the ECA concerts) that he was thought of as the old man (he was in his mid thirties). Derek was quite unique and there are a lot of adjectives you could throw at him but 'unique' and 'original' are absolutely true. Like his guitar playing, he was very unorthodox, uncompromising, provocative, impulsively inquisitive and joyful. He was always full of surprises and extremely funny!
I have a private cassette recording of Derek playing ‘As Time Goes By' from Casablanca, so maybe he did mellow in his later years.

Iain Patterson - East Linton - June 2025

since 1994

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