Creativity Quote by Derek Bailey

Bailey’s taste here reads like a small provocation dressed up as preference: he’s not praising percussion as accompaniment, he’s praising percussionists as full citizens of musical thought. Coming from a guitarist who helped define free improvisation, that matters. The guitar, in most band economies, is a narrative engine: harmony, riffs, the “front.” Bailey spent a career trying to sabotage that hierarchy, stripping the instrument of its default charisma. So when he says he likes duos with percussionists, he’s choosing the one partner least likely to let the guitar slip back into familiar leadership.

The subtext is about friction as a virtue. A percussionist doesn’t “fill out” the sound; they complicate it. In a duo, there’s nowhere to hide behind chords or groove. The percussionist’s presence forces the guitarist into hyper-attention: gesture, timbre, timing, silence. It’s a preference for conversation over arrangement, for risk over polish.

“I like the songs that percussionists sing” is the slyer line. It nods to percussionists who literally sing, but it also reframes “song” as something broader than melody and lyric. Percussionists “sing” through pattern, touch, and breath-like phrasing; their music has shape and intention even when it refuses the conventional tune. Bailey is quietly arguing against the old split between rhythmic labor and melodic authorship. In the world he came from, percussionists were often treated as infrastructure. He’s saying: no, that’s where the poetry is.