Derek Bailey

Derek Bailey (January 29, 1930 – December 25, 2005) was a free improvising avant-garde guitarist. The most noticeable feature of his style is what appears to be its extreme discontinuity, often from note to note: there may be enormous intervals between consecutive notes, and rather than aspiring to the consistency of timbre typical of most guitar-playing, Bailey interrupts it as much as possible: four consecutive notes, for instance, may be played on an open string, a fretted string, via harmonics, and using a nonstandard technique such as scraping the string with the pick or plucking below the bridge.

Many of the key features of his music –radical discontinuity, the self-contained brevity of each gesture, an attraction to wide intervals– owe much to Bailey's early fascination with Anton Webern, an influence most audible on Bailey's earliest available recordings, Pieces for Guitar (1966-67, issued on Tzadik).