Creativity Quote by Derek Bailey

Derek Bailey’s line reads like a shrug, but it lands as a quiet manifesto from a musician who made a career out of refusing the usual scripts. Bailey is practically synonymous with “free improvisation,” a practice that outsiders often mistake for solitary genius or chaos-by-choice. “Company” flips that misconception. It’s not a sentimental nod to camaraderie; it’s an admission that his most rigorous tool was other people.

In Bailey’s world, collaboration isn’t a soft value, it’s a method: a way to generate friction, surprise, and constraint in real time. The phrase “still the best way” matters. It suggests he tried other modes, knew the allure of control, maybe even the efficiency of working alone, and kept returning to the one situation where control is impossible. That’s the subtext: the group as a kind of productive discomfort. In improv, “company” means you’re constantly negotiating taste, timing, and risk with someone else’s instincts. Your habits get exposed. Your ego gets audited.

Context sharpens it. Bailey’s project called Company (running from the late 1970s) staged week-long gatherings of musicians who often hadn’t played together before, then documented the results. It was anti-band and anti-brand: rotating personnel, mixed aesthetics, no stable identity to market. In an industry that rewards repeatable product, Bailey prized the unrepeatable moment. “Company” becomes both the literal name of his experiment and the larger argument: the best work happens when you invite in the variables you can’t curate.