Concluding his series on seriously alternative guitar playing Jon Lewin traces the path of strange strumming over the years, and talks to Derek Bailey. He's definitely whacky.

Bloody hell this is a big subject — after all, just what qualifies as 'unconventional'? In last month's attempted introduction to the subject, I suggested that you could do just about everything to your guitar and get away with calling it music. But in this month's interview, Derek Bailey (whose records elicited numerous comments of 'can he really play properly?' in the office) demonstrates that you have to be profoundly technically proficient to be truly experimental.

IT'S NOT REALLY MUSIC

Last month's discussions with Andy Gill and Sonic Youth made it clear that their success — artistic and commercial - derived from a clear knowledge of both the ideas behind the music and their aptitude for the guitar. As Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü said of the highly regarded British avant garde player Fred Frith, "People hear someone like him, and say he can't play. They don't realise he had to learn to play that way. Atonality has to be considered, thought about..."

The conclusion to be drawn from that advice is that there is no short cut to playing 'new' guitar — to do that, you must first know how to do all the old stuff. There is no avant garde blues scale to learn.

YES IT IS

Or is there? Going back through the history of unorthodox guitar styles last month, it became clear that innovation was often simply a matter of mixing styles out of context, from Charlie Christian's imitations of sax solos to Allan Holdsworth's rocky jazz. Where would The Jesus & Mary Chain's early tunes have got without their deft combinations of Beach Boys tunes and Velvets-ish feedback? So yer good old-fashioned blues scale could sound exciting again, providing you don't put it in a blues song.

A trick I used for de-boring dull guitar parts was to play a semitone sharper than the rest of the band. This sets up a musical tension with the other instruments that you can resolve at any time by slipping back into key. It can also set up a musical tension with the other players when they complain about your tone deafness — but as Chuck Berry said, "If you make a mistake, repeat it." Brian Eno supports this with his renowned epithet "Honour thy mistake as hidden intention."

THINK ABOUT IT

That I'm quoting musicians rather than showing chord charts is important: you have to think carefully about unconventional guitar playing, both style and context.

A common complaint against many guitarists is that they play with their fingers rather than with their brains. Anybody who has learned a set of fingerings and scales will naturally tend towards repeating these patterns when left to their own devices — whenever you find yourself doing this, stop and put the guitar down. Think about what you're trying to play; go through it in your head, working on the melody as you'd like to hear it. That way you avoid your fingers just playing what's comfortable.

The composer Webern tried to cut all repetition out of his music. Think about that.

Michael Karoli of Can once said he thought of his guitar parts (presumably not all the time) as 'like a herd of cows running downhill'. Shut your eyes and imagine what MK meant... Not easy, eh? Perhaps a drumming on the body of the guitar, or a series of descending arpeggios? Michael Karoli may be pretty mad, but it's still an interesting illustration of the abstract approach you can take to your guitar.

LISTEN TO THIS

Although guitarists like Chet Atkins, Duane Eddy and Django Reinhardt are hardly unconventional by today's standards, in their own time their playing helped expand the public's notion of guitar playing. Melodies from the bass strings — who'd ever thought of such a thing?

In the mid-sixties, apart from the supreme Hendrix, players like Roger McGuinn and Syd Barrett were highly influential. McGuinn used the electric 12-string to play lead riffs that were derived directly from jazzers like John Coltrane ('Eight Miles High'). Syd Barrett's psychedelic Telecaster on the first Pink Floyd LP helped young players like Richard Lloyd (later of Television) discover the guitar as a voice in its own right, rather than simply an accompanying instrument to a vocal. Contemporary San Francisco bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane followed that same route simultaneously, helping lead Clapton into the improvisational excesses of Cream's live performances. Further out than anyone else was Captain Beefheart, whose Magic Band really did the business when it came to playing strange guitar in a 'rock' framework.

In the 1970s, virtuosi like Steve Howe (with Yes) and Jeff Beck ("Blow By Blow") mixed classical and jazz styles with rock; Neil Young mated country with heavy rock; Zappa did everything (all at the same time); the whole period was one of decontextualising, making new ideas by mixing up old ones. It wasn't until The Punk Revolution (hooray) that guitar players began trying new things again.

NOW LISTEN TO THIS

Most punk bands were simply sped-up heavy metal. But a few guitarists actually took the spirit of the movement to their hearts: we eulogised the great Andy Gill's work with the Gang Of Four last month. The New York scene of the late seventies was a very fruitful ground for new talent: apart from avant garde guitar composers like Glenn Branca (see last month), there were the twin lead guitars of Television, Talking Heads, The Ramones, and — most importantly for our purposes — Richard Hell & The Voidoids. Playing with Hell was one Robert Quine, a most unlikely looking guitar hero. Listen to his disjointed angular work on the "Blank Generation" LP, and you'll hear a rhythmic and melodic inventiveness that surpasses almost anything since Hendrix. Quine uses chords, single notes, and the holes between them — it's choppy, exciting stuff, packed with ideas to steal.

There's a great story about Blondie, who came from the same New York background — the west country whacko Robert Fripp played on one of their singles without listening to the backing track. Who cares about keys? Or frets?

This decade (all seven years) has seen a number of peculiar players — from the noise curtains of the Birthday Party's Roland Howard, through Adrian Belew, Eugene Chadbourne, David Rhodes, Henry Kaiser... but there's no great eccentric genius to emulate at present. The current fashion seems once again to be for guitarists to master several styles, then mix and match them to their own ends.

ER, THAT'S IT

The best way of learning is to play. Invent your own tricks, your own sounds. The second best way of learning is to listen. Pick out some of the artists I've enthused about and listen closely to the way they've worked their guitar parts into the songs. Spend some money. Buy Captain Beefheart's "Spotlight Kid"; The Gang Of Four "Live At The Palace"; anything by Derek Bailey; a Hendrix live record; Richard Hell's "Blank Generation"; the first Pink Floyd LP; and a Glenn Branca tape (ROIR Tapes). I could go on. I hope you will.

To the unsympathetic ear, guitarist Derek Bailey's performances are a cacophonous racket; but listen closely to what's going on inside the noise and you will find phenomenal technique, and superbly controlled playing. His deliberate tonal perversity may be intellectually challenging, but it is also a refreshing and stimulating alternative from more familiar noises.

Derek has been making his living as a guitarist for nearly 40 years (he's now 57). He first came to free improvisation with Gavin Bryars and Tony Oxley in the early 1960s with their jazz trio Joseph Holbrooke. Since then DB has been playing in this unstructured medium almost exclusively, either solo or with other musicians under the name Company.

Free improvisation is difficult music. It deliberately avoids the safe 'learned' patterns of melody and rhythm, and seems to have a different goal to that of traditional western music. So what does Derek say to the accusation that much free improvisation is unlistenable?

"For most people, the end result is the music. I'm much more interested in making music than the music that's made," he explained.

"You can't play music without it having an aural presence, obviously. But you can be involved in music where the aural presence is not the prime thing, because you might not know until it happens what the aural presence is going to be — that attracts me a lot. My concern is not for end results. This might sound ridiculous to most of your readers, but I'm interested to work like that."

Ignoring the interests of the audience is a complete antithesis to the attitude of most professional musicians. However, Derek sells around 1000 copies of every release, and tours the world regularly.

"That very tiny number of people who are interested in what I do — fortunately a large enough number to keep me doing it — I assume that they have, for their own reasons, an interest in what I'm doing. Their way of recognising what I'm doing is listening to it, of course, but they recognise something other than its surface immediate sound. It sounds like it is, a bit all over the bloody place at times...."

Derek Bailey's music is largely atonal in nature: conventional harmonies and chords are replaced by tone clusters and dissonance.

"Tonality is like an argument, and the answers to the questions are always the same. Play Gmin7, C13, and the next chord has to be one of three or four things. If you're looking to get away from that kind of thing, you have to use a different language. Atonality is a way of moving from one point to another without answering questions — almost a sequence of isolated events. Atonality has a non-grammatical quality, a non-causal sequence to it..

Free improvisation is unstructured, by definition. "Unless you're tone deaf, music structures itself. In free improvisation, you're supposed to be starting from scratch, which of course is not possible. But it should be as near as you can simulate. I try to avoid hearing things in my head — beginnings, phrases. In fact, I like to sleep before I play — a blank mind is the best preparation."

"Working solo is a real problem, because it's very easy in solo playing to get your act together, to produce something that's kind of perfect. The thing that attracts me more and more is keeping it non-fixed. Once it gets formalised, polished, my interest goes down."

In spite of the angularity of Bailey's guitar playing, he regards himself as a very conventional musician. Although he has experimented in the past with treated guitars (a 19-string Epiphone in particular), he currently plays either a new Martin D18, or his old sunburst Gibson ES175D, both in standard tuning.

"I don't actually think of myself as an unorthodox player. I've only ever been able to work out of my background on the instrument, which is very conventional. I think — he said boastfully — I use the guitar in a more complete way than some people playing other musics are likely to."

He's also a very technical musician, with a seemingly complete mastery of the full range of tones available from the guitar.

"I like the nature of the guitar — that you can play middle C five different ways, and it will sound different in each position. You can play virtually any note, allowing for octave transpositions, in three basic ways, as a harmonic, open string, or stopped note. You can play the same notes and do a completely different set of fingerings. That's something I started to exploit — a mix of harmonics, open strings, stopped notes in different places..."

Derek demonstrated by playing a scale on his Martin, substituting harmonics (fourth, fifth, seventh, twelfth, and more) for fretted notes whenever possible, and showing a proper disregard for the niceties of sticking to a single octave. "There are six different ways of playing A; the note could be in any position."

I asked Derek if the nature of free improvisation made it possible to practise.

"The thing is in flux, and you practise the flux," he stated succinctly. "But there are ways: practising chromatic scales, with transpositions, playing scales with a mix of harmonics, open strings, and fretted notes, or playing clusters..."

What's a cluster?

"The usual definition of a tone cluster is two or three notes in short range, say B, C, C# — semitones, with the occasional tone. It's a chord, but not a definable chord. It's no more a melodic device than a minor 7th, but they don't have that sequential element — you can play anything after it."

Although Derek's own music is easily distinguishable, he recognises its limited appeal. "Some of the approaches to the guitar I've employed could be used in other ways. I've arrived at playing this way largely because of my interest in improvised music. I can play other ways — I've played a tune with somebody recently — but it's not for me."

It's almost impossible to do justice to Derek Bailey's guitar playing on paper (I know, I've tried). If you want to hear him, his LPs are available on Incus Records, c/o (Contact Details). Also available from the same address is Derek's fascinating and eminently readable book on improvisation and its uses in various musics, including rock.