from volcanictongue.com:

Derek Bailey
Playing For Friends On 5th Street
Straw2Gold S2G-002
Multi-region DVD

"At the age of 74, and on the verge of an almost complete retirement from playing live, guitarist Derek Bailey remains the most ferociously experimental and hermetically personal player to come out of the British ‘jazz’ scene. I say ‘jazz’ because Bailey has little truck with any kind of idiomatic playing style, having dedicated himself to formulating a language more suited to the demands of free improvisation than even established free jazz modes.Drawing on the kind of high velocity exchanges pioneered by early Bebop players,the advanced musical languages of thinkers like pianist Cecil Taylor and composer Anton Webern and the physical properties of the guitar itself, Bailey intuited a unique musical syntax that combined singing open strings, fast spidery runs and the percussive use of harmonics.

Birthing the Incus label in collaboration with saxophonist Evan Parker and percussionist Tony Oxley in 1970, Bailey set himself up as a lightning rod for players interested in pushing the musical freedom inherent in jazz all the way to its logical conclusion. In the process they intuited a music that was completely free of any definitively stated themes or tonal centre and that drew organisational logic from chains of allusive real-time musical – and non-musical – gestures.

Encountering Derek Bailey’s music via the medium of CDs can sometimes be a bit of a brain-scrambler. His music is so tied up with the actual physical act of playing that without the context of the movement of his hands and a sense of the real-time unfolding of events, it seems to make little sense. Seeing him live, on the other hand, can be a real ear-peeling experience, as the graceful arc of his hands, his inquisitive, exploratory approach and his disarmingly deadpan, flat-cap manner combine to both endear himself to the audience – effectively neutralising any doubts they might harbour about his music being deliberately obtuse - and conceptually anchor his initially abstract moves.

Playing For Friends On 5th Street, then, is a necessary addition to his back catalogue, a DVD document of an intimate in-store appearance in New York where he plays a vintage Epiphone hollow body that he bought on Staten Island. Here Bailey is on hilariously amiable form, punctuating tall tales and reminiscences with flurries of note activity. When he really digs in, as on the first extended piece, the results are revelatory. Despite the huge matrix of wow and plonk that he generates, he actually moves his hands fairly slowly and it’s a blast to watch the way the gradual accumulation of note clusters and droning chords start to spontaneously offer up various structural signposts. Over the past few decades it has become a popular pastime amongst dopes to pronounce the death of the guitar. When you see what it can do in the hands of someone like Derek Bailey, you realise that even its most basic territories remain comparatively unmapped.

As a special bonus for underground music fans, Playing For Friends… also features extensive background footage of Alan Licht in some of his most successful lurking to date. This is a multi-region DVD, should play on all players. Consists of close-up, single camera footage with the occasional mildly obtrusive use of visual effects (mainly sepia and slow-motion)."