Art & Creativity Quote by Derek Bailey

Bailey is describing a kind of artistic trespass that sounds almost polite until you hear the provocation inside it. “Somebody else’s area” isn’t just a genre; it’s a set of customs, gatekeepers, and unspoken rules about what counts as competence. He’s not talking about learning the local dialect to fit in. He’s talking about arriving with your own accent intact and letting the mismatch do the work.

The key move is the refusal embedded in “not playing their music.” In jazz, rock, folk, or “classical,” the usual crossover story is tribute: you prove respect by reproducing signatures, tones, swing-feel, repertoire. Bailey’s intent is the opposite: respect through disturbance. He treats style less like a language to master than a room to rearrange. That posture maps cleanly onto his role in free improvisation, where identity is built not on faithful execution but on decisions made in real time: timbre, density, attack, silence. “Whatever I do” is a commitment to process over idiom.

The subtext is about power. Entering someone else’s scene and refusing to assimilate is a way of testing how elastic the scene really is. Will it absorb you as novelty, reject you as heresy, or expose that its boundaries were always more social than musical? Bailey’s career thrived on that friction: the guitarist as saboteur and guest, slipping into “areas” like a social experiment. It’s also a self-protective ethic: if you never pretend to be an insider, you can’t be judged by insider metrics. You’re judged by the intensity of the encounter.