I spent the holidays reading Ben Watson's Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation (Verso), a chronicle of the legendary guitarist and his pioneering work since the early 1960s. A self-described Musical Marxist ("a confluence of punk, Zappa, and [music writer Theodor] Adorno") and disruptively erudite music writer, Watson quotes the cantankerous Bailey at length and peppers the book with brain-rattling asides: "Free Improvisation… confounds bourgeois assumptions about music being a matter of scores and records, fixities derived from the world of property relations and promising profits to those with capital to invest."
Watson examines specific recordings, summarizes the landmark series of Company Weeks organized by Bailey, and profiles other key musicians including Tony Oxley, Gavin Bryars, Paul Rutherford, and Anthony Braxton. I wanted more "history," especially coverage of precursors (Tristano, Oliveros), but in the introduction Watson decrees "Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation is designed to be contradictory, argumentative, and unfinished…" All true, and nonetheless a provocative, highly recommendable book.
I'm also enthralled by When Music Resists Meaning: The Major Writings of Herbert Brün (Wesleyan). Brün (1918-2000) worked in the fabled electronic music studios of WDR Cologne in the 1950s and later settled in Illinois to teach. His essays abound with insights about how music communicates information and the intersection of music and language. He spouts juicy, thoughtful polemics too: "…as long as most radical, progressive, and wonderfully musical band musicians keep up the beat, the repetition of forms, the loop-like repeat, then they are doing a disservice to the development of music. And no lyrics can liberate them…" In my view, Brün's music ranges from brilliant to banal; the book includes an audio CD (including the fine Futility 1964) so you can decide for yourself.
