Creativity Quote by Derek Bailey

Bailey is smuggling a whole aesthetic manifesto into an offhand gripe about band dynamics. As a cornerstone of free improvisation, he’s pushing back against the fantasy that music is mainly about personal expression delivered cleanly from one genius to an audience. The friction is the feature. “Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it isn’t” lands like a shrug, but it’s also a refusal of the consumer promise that art should reliably satisfy. Improvised music, in Bailey’s world, is closer to weather than product: contingent, unruly, occasionally unpleasant, and alive precisely because nobody fully controls it.

The line about “the point” is doing heavy work. Playing with others forces you into risk: mishearing, clashing, being interrupted, having your favorite idea die in real time. That’s not a bug, it’s the social engine of the form. Bailey’s guitar language often sounded like it was arguing with itself; here he admits the argument really needs other people to become meaningful. The “solo” he dismisses isn’t just one person onstage. It’s the whole cultural drift toward self-sufficiency: the virtuoso as lone brand, the studio as private lab, the artist as content pipeline.

Context matters: postwar British improv grew partly in the shadow of jazz’s hierarchies and classical music’s obedience. Bailey’s point is almost political. Collaboration isn’t a feel-good ideal; it’s a messy negotiation where the music earns its right to exist.