"I think playing solo is a second rate activity, really. For me, playing is about playing with other people"
About this Quote
Bailey’s provocation lands like a gauntlet tossed at the feet of the virtuoso tradition. In most popular imagination, “solo” equals mastery: the lone genius, spotlighted, narrating their interior world at volume. Bailey flips that script and, in doing so, tells you what kind of musician he refuses to be. Calling solo playing “second rate” isn’t a technical judgment so much as a values judgment. He’s demoting the entire ideology of self-sufficiency.
The intent is almost disciplinary: to re-center improvisation as a social art, not a display case. Bailey came out of the postwar British free-improv scene, where the point wasn’t to execute a pre-written self, but to discover what happens when multiple minds collide in real time. In that context, the “other people” aren’t accompaniment; they’re the instrument. Interaction becomes the material. Listening is not politeness, it’s production.
The subtext is also a quiet critique of music’s marketplace, which rewards clean authorship: the soloist as brand, the album cover as a single face, the myth of total control. Ensemble improvisation scrambles credit and destabilizes hierarchy; it’s harder to sell, harder to canonize, and harder to fake. Bailey’s line insists that risk is the point. Alone, you can perfect your language. With others, your language gets interrupted, stretched, occasionally broken - and that’s where something genuinely new can happen.
The intent is almost disciplinary: to re-center improvisation as a social art, not a display case. Bailey came out of the postwar British free-improv scene, where the point wasn’t to execute a pre-written self, but to discover what happens when multiple minds collide in real time. In that context, the “other people” aren’t accompaniment; they’re the instrument. Interaction becomes the material. Listening is not politeness, it’s production.
The subtext is also a quiet critique of music’s marketplace, which rewards clean authorship: the soloist as brand, the album cover as a single face, the myth of total control. Ensemble improvisation scrambles credit and destabilizes hierarchy; it’s harder to sell, harder to canonize, and harder to fake. Bailey’s line insists that risk is the point. Alone, you can perfect your language. With others, your language gets interrupted, stretched, occasionally broken - and that’s where something genuinely new can happen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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