Great Lives : Derek Bailey

A surprising episode of the BBC Radio 4 program Great Lives, with the comedian Stewart Lee nominating the guitarist Derek Bailey. The episode begins with Matthew Paris, the show’s host, offering a lengthy explanation of the great variety of lives under discussion and how they’re chosen. It’s as if he’s preparing the audience for something out of the ordinary, or out of the ordinarily “great.”

Near the end of the episode, after a short clip of Bailey playing an improvisation titled “To Be Arranged,” Paris likens the music to what a chimpanzee might produce if given a guitar.

Lee replies:

Matthew, this is such an idiotic thing to say, really. A chimpanzee doesn’t even have the fingernails to play to make that sound, right? You’re better than that, right? You know, you really are, and you can’t give a program like this over to an artist like that and then throw that kind of stuff at them, not with the reading you’ve done and the interviews you’ve heard of him. You’re on the BBC, right? You’ve got to meet the challenge of a culture that is failing artists and failing the public in terms of exposing them to good stuff, and you mustn’t put that idea out there. You have to double back on it. And the duty of a broadcaster is to support stuff, not to undermine it.

Lee adds that to invoke a chimpanzee is to fall into cliché: “At least say an octopus or a wasp or something, for God’s sake.”

Paris says his only duty is to offer his honest response. I suppose he’s right, but he would have done better to offer a more intelligent honest response: “Stewart, I have to admit that I have no idea what he’s doing. But I take it that he does. Am I right?”

Or something like that. You can hear the musical sample and the conversation that follows beginning at the 26:00 mark.

A second musical sample: the opening of “Laura,” from an album of standards that Bailey recorded late in his career. “I could hear a little bit,” Paris says about this one. “This may be a problem with my bandwidth.”

Derek Bailey’s musicianship isn’t my idea of the guitar, but I respect what he was doing and know that he knew what he was doing.