The festival’s concept is inspired by, but is not a copy of, Derek Bailey’s Company.

Derek Bailey (1930–2005) was a pioneer of European free improvisation: he developed a radically original, non-idiomatic guitar language that broke away from jazz and all other stylistic conventions, and furthermore provided the scene with an infrastructure and a theoretical foundation through the Incus label, the annual meeting platform ‘Company’ and his influential book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music.

Company was Bailey’s way of bringing together improvisers who, under normal circumstances, might never have considered playing with one another: he gathered them in a space, then placed them on stage in front of an audience and allowed their differences and incompatibilities to generate the music. Bailey led Company from 1976 to 1994. Its basic format, a group of musicians, combinations decided shortly before the performance, and a week to explore them, went on to influence festivals of improvised music around the world.

A regular group gradually develops a shared vocabulary. That vocabulary becomes a repertoire, and ultimately that repertoire can spell the end of improvisation itself. “Back then,” Bailey later recalled, “the main way of organising improvised music was to set up regular groups, something I was already somewhat disillusioned with.”

Bailey assembled a group of musicians whom he deliberately selected from different musical traditions, different countries and with different ideas about what music could or should be. He then put them on stage in combinations that were only decided a few minutes beforehand. There were no rehearsals, no pre-determined material, and often the musicians had never met before.

“There has to be a certain degree, not just of unfamiliarity, but also of incompatibility. Otherwise, what’s the point of improvising?”

— DEREK BAILEY

For Bailey, difficulty was not an unfortunate side-effect of the process; it was, in fact, at its very heart. “If there are no difficulties, it seems to me that there is virtually no point in playing. I find that the things that fascinate me consist of trying to make something work.”

Derek Bailey | Leo Smith | Tony Oxley | Johnny Dyani | Company Week, London 1978. Photo: Gérard Rouy