Free improvisation is the automatic writing, the abstract expressionism, or as British critic Ben Watson most aptly describes it, the "stand-up comedy" of musical performance. Real-time process takes priority over product, what you hear is what you get, and in hearing's immediacy lies the promise of escaping, if temporarily, the rules and boring habits of received musical discourse. (Heckle, however, and risk your life.) Free improv is thus the royal road to artistic nirvana, and many believe 74-year-old British guitarist Derek Bailey to be the nonstyle's perfect master. Hearing Bailey, trumpets Watson, "will shatter your world picture, and cause you to reconsider every fact about twentieth-century music—and artistic meaning, and politics, and class," and so on. Free Improvisation, sporting Watson's preferred capitalization, is modernist Marxism in action: "Bailey . . . was convinced that music is something to be played rather than marketed or... More >>>