Creativity Quote by Derek Bailey

There is a sly victory lap tucked into Bailey's dry phrasing. "Quite gratifying" sounds almost polite, but the sentence is really a musician's raised eyebrow: the people who once treated his "method of working" as suspect now burn through it with abandon. He doesn't name the method, because in Bailey's world it doesn't need branding. It's the ethos of free improvisation: making music without a script, trusting the moment, treating technique as a toolbox rather than a doctrine. What used to read as undisciplined or anti-musical becomes, later, a resource others can raid.

The delicious bite is in "profligate". It's not just that his critics came around; it's that they use the approach wastefully, even fashionably, as if it were a new effect pedal. Bailey's intent isn't only to gloat. It's to expose a recurring cultural cycle: the avant-garde gets scolded for breaking rules, then repackaged once the shock wears off, often by the very gatekeepers who policed it. He frames the reversal as "gratifying" because vindication matters when you've been treated as a problem to solve.

Context matters: Bailey worked in a scene where institutional jazz, classical orthodoxy, and club economics all had reasons to distrust improvisation that refused familiar narratives. The quote quietly insists that innovation is often understood last by the people most invested in telling everyone what counts.