Jazzy D's Soul Notes

More Wire related stuff - another piece of writing by staff and ex-staff members.

The Wire #270, Freedom Principles, 2014: Emily Bick Rockin’ In The Free World

The Wire has always covered music that engages with the difficult idea of freedom, whether that’s freeing oneself from traditional musical structures, striving via radical music towards freedom from oppression, investigating freedom by exploring its obverse of power and control, or just freeing the body to dance in the liberatory space of the club. In the process it can’t help but romanticise – as I’ve just done! – music’s potential to free the mind, the ass, society and so on – and so one of my favourite essays in the Freedom Principles issue is the one that reminds you how easily ideas of freedom can be co-opted. Emily Bick’s chose to write about Freedom Rock, a classic rock compilation that came out, as Emily writes, during “the height of Reaganite swashbuckling”, in 1987, with a cringe-making advert (“Turn it UP, man!”) often broadcast during re-runs of shows from the 1970s. Emily writes, “Freedom as an adjective, especially attached to anything so tied to obvious marketing and exhortations to consume stuff, has a special American capitalist realist ring. Like freedom fries or shopping for freedom after 9/11, it’s never about freedom, but the idea of selling freedom as a means to soothe and control.” She ends the piece connecting the Reaganite 80s with the all-seeing algorithms of YouTube and the invisible workers of Amazon. I’ve made it sound like a downer, but honestly it’s really funny.

Oh and here is a cover of a Leonard Cohen song -

Thalia Zedek - Dance Me To The End Of Love



Derek Bailey interviewed by David Keenan, #247, September 2004

This interview was made the year before the guitarist's death from Motor Neurone Disease, but he's at his ornery finest: “I think improvisation's great era is over, its time is gone...for any music to be really vibrant it lasts about seven or eight years. That's all of music, every music period". He reiterates his view of free improv as non-idiomatic: "You have no guide, you don't start from an idiom, like jazz or rock, you start from nothing and see what happens...I think of non-idiomatic playing as an aim. I've never thought to play freely you can associate with a style, at least for me.” Here he describes his remarkable late recordings Standards and Ballads: “I used to improvise on the chords before but this time I just played whatever it was I wanted to play from the tune...I don't know what I was improvising on. I wasn't improvising on the melody or the chords”. Writer David Keenan is on good form, describing Bailey's unlikely hook-up with DJ Ninj, “a Junglist from Birmingham who laid down a tape of cracked beats as anchor to some of Bailey's most disobedient electric guitar”.

Derek Bailey - Guitar, Drums N Bass (FULL ALBUM)



1. N/Jz/Bm (Re Mix) 0:00
2. Re-Re-Re (Up Mix) 3:33
3. Dnjbb (Cake Mix) 5:05
4. Concrete (Cement Mix) 18:01
5. Ninj (De Mix) 25:58
6. Pie (Amatosis Mix) 37:27