Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation

Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation
Author: Ben Watson
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781844670031

Lifts the lid on an artistic ferment which has defied every known law of the music business.

Improvisation

Improvisation
Author: Derek Bailey
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1993-08-22
Genre: Music
ISBN:

Derek Bailey's IMPROVISATION, originally published in 1980, now revised with additional interviews and photographs, deals with the nature of improvisation in all its forms--Indian music, flamenco, baroque, organ music, rock, jazz, contemporary, and "free" music. Bailey offers a clear view of the breathtaking spectrum of possibilities inherent in improvisational practice.

Keith Rowe

Keith Rowe
Author: Brian Olewnick
Publisher: powerHouse Books
Total Pages: 503
Release: 2018-06-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1576878643

"For someone interested in going 'beyond' with music and with guitar, this essential history will help you set your sights on places no musician has gone." -Henry Kaiser for Guitar Moderne The first and only authorized biography about Keith Rowe, his solo career, and his influence as the guitarist in the cult British improvised music band AMM, a group who counted Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd, Sonic Youth, and composer Christian Wolff as admirers. In London, in the fall of 1965, a group of four musicians, dissatisfied with the confines they had encountered in the British jazz scene, came together with a highly thought-out agenda to revolutionize the way music was created:no repertoire, no solos, no regular rhythms, no melodies, no fear of silence, 100% improvised.This rejected rules firmly in place then, as now, among even the most forward-looking of musicians. Keith Rowe was one of the founding membersof this collective. They called themselves AMM and soon added the composer Cornelius Cardew, an associate of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was seeking to escape what he thought were equivalent strictures in the avant-garde classical world. As a quintet, AMM created music unlike anything else being done at the time and, being immersed in the London scene of the mid-60s in which musical boundaries were amorphous, found themselves on the one hand sharing bills with nascent bands like Pink Floyd, The Who, and Cream while on the other working with and alongside Yoko Ono and Christian Wolff. Rowe, a guitarist trained as a painter, adapted to his guitar the lessons he'd learned in the visual arts, placing it flat on a table or the ground as Jackson Pollock had done with his canvases, using it as a sound source to be approached with all manner of implements, opening up a vast new territory of exploration, one which would be enormously influential in rock and contemporary classical, as well as the field of free improvisation. Over 12 years in the making and via exhaustive research and exclusive interviews Brian Olewnick has traced Rowe's life from childhood through the present, with focuses on London's mid-60s experimental music scene, the political unrest of the late 60s, the radical politics of the early 70s, the ongoing saga of AMM through the 90s and the accompanying advance of creative music over that time period, centered around Rowe's participation in those events and his major contributions to the contemporary avant-garde environment. Through the many ups and downs of AMM and beyond, Rowe has become an eminence grise to generations of musicians and is still today continuing to push the boundaries of what is possible in the world of sound.

Records Ruin the Landscape

Records Ruin the Landscape
Author: David Grubbs
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2014-03-03
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822377101

John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP? In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.

Perpetual Frontier

Perpetual Frontier
Author: Joe Morris
Publisher:
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2012
Genre: Improvisation (Music)
ISBN: 9780985981006

Extended Play

Extended Play
Author: John Corbett
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1994
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780822314738

In Extended Play, one of the country's most innovative music writers conducts a wide-ranging tour through the outer limits of contemporary music. Over the course of more than twenty-five portraits, interviews, and essays, John Corbett engages artists from lands as distant as Sweden, Siberia, and Saturn. With a special emphasis on African American and European improvisers, the book explores the famous and the little known, from John Cage and George Clinton to Anthony Braxton and Sun Ra. Employing approaches as diverse as the music he celebrates, Corbett illuminates the sound and theory of funk and rap, blues and jazz, contemporary classical, free improvisation, rock, and reggae. Using cultural critique and textual theory, Corbett addresses a broad spectrum of issues, such as the status of recorded music in postmodern culture, the politics of self-censorship, experimentation, and alternativism in the music industry, and the use of metaphors of space and madness in the work of African American musicians. He follows these more theoretically oriented essays with a series of extensive profiles and in-depth interviews that offer contrasting and complementary perspectives on some of the world's most creative musicians and their work. Included here are more than twenty original photographs as well as a meticulously annotated discography. The result is one of the most thoughtful, and most entertaining, investigations of contemporary music available today.

The Free Musics

The Free Musics
Author: Jack Wright (Musician)
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Free jazz
ISBN: 9781537777245

This book has been provocative, since it views the situation playersfind themselves in and ignores the perspective of consumers, the media,and academics. It explores their assumptions and practices--their musicalapproach, relations to the music world, to each other, and to the socialorder. It traces the changes in these conditions since the origins ofthese musics. The response to it from musicians has been very strong,many saying it puts their own thoughts into words."--Résumé du site web de l'éditeur.

A Power Stronger Than Itself

A Power Stronger Than Itself
Author: George E. Lewis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 726
Release: 2008-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226477037

Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images. Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, A Power Stronger Than Itself uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.

I Want to Be Ready

I Want to Be Ready
Author: Danielle Goldman
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2010-05-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472050842

A conceptual framework for understanding the development of improvised dance in late 20th-century America