Creativity Quote by Derek Bailey

Bailey’s line lands like a polite insult delivered with a straight face: blues is “fine,” but “free blues” is nonsense. Coming from one of free improvisation’s most rigorous minds, it’s not a conservative swipe at experimentation; it’s a boundary marker. Bailey is separating freedom as a method from genre as a set of inherited obligations.

The blues isn’t just a chord progression. It’s a social technology: a vocabulary built to carry specific kinds of pain, humor, swagger, restraint. Even when it gets electrified, abstracted, or commercialized, it still leans on recognizable moves and a shared history between player and listener. “Free blues” tries to keep the aura of that history while discarding the constraints that make it legible. Bailey is basically asking: if you remove the grammar, why keep the accent?

There’s also a jab here at a certain avant-garde branding. “Free” can become a prestige tag, a way to borrow the blues’ authenticity while claiming exemption from its disciplines. Bailey, who treated improvisation as craft rather than catharsis, distrusts that kind of cultural name-dropping. His subtext is practical: if you want to play blues, commit to its language; if you want to be free, don’t hide behind a genre label.

Context matters: post-60s British improv often defined itself against jazz’s stylistic hierarchies while still living in jazz’s shadow. Bailey’s sentence cuts that shadow down to size.