Creativity Quote by Derek Bailey

“I have always been attracted to the cottage industry side of this business” is Derek Bailey planting a flag for a certain kind of musical life: small-scale, self-directed, and stubbornly uninterested in being streamlined. Coming from a guitarist who helped define free improvisation, the line lands as both a practical preference and a quiet manifesto. “Attracted” is key: not “forced into” or “resigned to,” but drawn toward the margins where decisions stay close to the work.

The phrase “cottage industry” does a lot of cultural lifting. It evokes handmade goods, local economies, and production that’s intimate enough to feel accountable. In music-business terms, it’s a vote against the industrial logic that turns art into inventory: market testing, genre policing, promotional cycles, the subtle pressure to repeat what sells. Bailey’s subtext is that improvisation can’t thrive under those conditions. A music built on risk and real-time listening needs an ecosystem that tolerates failure, oddness, and inconsistency - the very traits big systems edit out.

Context matters: Bailey’s career ran parallel to postwar Britain’s arts infrastructure, the rise of the major-label monoculture, and then the punk/indie aftershocks that made DIY not just possible but principled. His work (and projects like Incus Records) treated distribution, documentation, and community as extensions of musicianship. The line also carries a pragmatic humility: the “business” is acknowledged, but downsized to human scale, where the reward isn’t mass visibility but autonomy, continuity, and a scene you can actually recognize from gig to gig.