John Zorn has pulled off the coup of the year by persuading Derek Bailey to record Ballads, an album of jazz standards. It’s of course an instant collector’s item for avantgarde music fans, and would be so even if it were a major disappointment; but I find myself still astonished that it is in fact by any measure a successful, indeed superb recording, one which I have found myself listening to repeatedly.

Despite the presence of “Body and Soul,” “Laura,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “Stella by Starlight,” and other standards, Bailey does not use them structurally as a jazz performer would. Twelve songs are embedded in a more or less continuous 41-minute improvisation, often stated only partially, and only on rare occasions does Bailey tip his hat to jazz’s classic head-solos-head structure by restating the melody. This procedure isn’t so far from his practice on other solo discs, since despite his reputation to the contrary he’s often spliced passages of jazz into his solo peformances (e.g. “Stella by Starlight” on Domestic and Public Pieces; “Imagination” on Fairly Early with Postscripts; 1930s-style swing guitar and “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” on Drop Me Off at 96th). The difference is that the irony that informed those earlier interpolations is to my ear absent on Ballads: this is not carnivalesque desecration in the manner of Chadbourne or Billy Jenkins. The ballads are rendered in a strong and faithful manner; yet the improvisations are entirely within Bailey’s now-familiar abstract idiom.

I find it extremely hard to explain why the stylistic clash isn’t merely self-cancelling or mannered. Each modality informs the other in an oblique way that would probably be hard to capture in a transcription or analysis but is instantly sensed by the listener. It’s an album that constantly creates odd aural and memorial illusions and puzzles. For instance, when Bailey drops into the B section of a recognizable tune, does this mean the preceding abstractions have actually been coded versions of the A section? I’ve sometimes actually pressed the rewind button to find out. The improvisation following “Body and Soul” to my ears is definitely a ghostly commentary on the tune, but other improvisations defy tethering to the melodies. And yet I’m left newly impressed with the melodic strength, even singing quality of Bailey’s signature ringing harmonics—perhaps a latent quality in all his solo work I simply hadn’t noticed until now?

Among many notable moments on this enjoyable and thought-provoking album let me single out just one more. On this album, as on any of Bailey’s solo discs, you can find his favourite motif of the rapid repetition of a single note using different fingerings and articulations, so that the resulting slight harmonic differences subtly clash. Near the end of track 12, “You Go to My Head,” Bailey instead dawdles over an octave interval, in a way that’s fundamentally ambiguous: it could be either a variant of that personal, abstract pattern, or a conventional jazz vamp. As it hangs suspended so does the listener, waiting to see on which side of the fence it will fall. (Remarkably, in the event Bailey manages to fulfill both expectations.)

The album ends with a wonderful flourish, a sweet yet triumphant “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone”; after its last ringing chord, Bailey ascends to high behind-the-bridge pings; and at last gentle upwards rubs of the strings. Throughout the album Bailey has avoided sentimentalizing these old standards, while never desiccating them. Yet these final seconds I think tip the whole album’s balance: I find them ultimately very moving.

Nate Dorward

Coda