No Isolation: A Conversation with Dave Holland (Part One)

Ludwig van Beethoven once noted, “Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.” Such knowledge includes a unified understanding of humanity in which we all, to some extent, influence one another. Given the brilliance of their output, it is often easy to assume that the most incredible artists create wholly on their own. But, in reality, no one creates in a vacuum. Bassist Dave Holland understands this well. Even as a longtime leading figure of improvised music, he continually works to grow and develop from the lessons and perspectives of those around him.

That is not to minimize the brilliance of Holland’s artistic contributions. He is unarguably one of the best bassists of his generation and has spent his entire six-decade career pushing the music forward. His early 70s work expanded the experimentalist aspirations of the avant-garde movement. His solo instrument outings, whether on bass or cello, were groundbreaking. He has taken part in several excellent projects that have furthered the desire to integrate various Folk musics – including Appalachian bluegrass, flamenco music, and Middle Eastern maqams – into the jazz idiom. The sheer breadth of the NEA Jazz Master’s scope makes comprehensive coverage of the entirety of his time with music difficult. This interview only scrapes the surface.

However, the contours of Holland’s artistic statements are shaped by those around him. Projects of free expression were carved alongside Anthony Braxton, Derek Bailey, Sam Rivers, and Evan Parker, to name a few. Even unaccompanied performances incorporate lessons learned from others, whether Miles Davis, Stan Getz, or Thelonious Monk. For the various projects incorporating music from around the globe, the master frequently becomes a willing student of figures like Pepe Habichuela, Zakir Hussain, and Anouar Brahem. His focus on relationships cogently explains how Holland can fit into so many different styles of music while sounding distinctly like himself.

His latest project – the New Quartet with pianist Kris Davis, saxophonist Jaleel Shaw, and drummer Nasheet Waits – builds upon Holland’s longtime compatible roles as equal parts teacher and pupil. The other musicians in the group, a generation younger than the leader, bring their distinct perspectives to the ensemble, which shape how the bassist approaches their music together. Audiences, in person or virtually, can experience the conversations the group creates together from the quartet’s upcoming residency at the Smoke Jazz Club – Holland’s first time there – from September 4th to 8th, 2024.

We were honored to sit down with Holland to discuss some of the projects during his career and how they were shaped by the influences of, and relationships with, other musicians.

PostGenre: What do you enjoy most about the New Quartet? 

Dave Holland: Well, I think it is the people in it. And, why do I like them? The main thing is that they’re people I’ve admired for some time as players. I’ve had a chance to play with them on different occasions, but not enough. I wanted to put a new group together that could explore a wide range of ideas and approaches to the music. I felt that these three individuals would be a wonderful combination. I didn’t know exactly how things would sound. You never really do when you put a band together. But all three of Jaleel Shaw, Kris Davis, and Nasheet Waits are wonderful players. They’ve also all got a great sense of community in the music in terms of playing in a group and interacting with other musicians. That’s such an important part of the music for me. 

Last summer, when we came together to do our first tour, our chemistry was beautiful. Things were happening between each of us in ways I hadn’t anticipated. You can’t anticipate it; it just starts happening. That first tour got us going. We’ve done a few different things since then. And now we are in another chapter of our experience together as a group. I think ultimately what draws me in is the range of possibilities that are available with these great players. We are also featuring music composed by each of us. I like the different points of view that are represented not just in our playing but in our compositions as well. 

PG: You noted in another interview that you seek diversity of voices in your bands. When selecting musicians for the quartet, did you keep anything specific in mind? For instance, were you looking for a piano player who fits well within the avant-garde scene and selected Kris [Davis] as someone who met that criteria?

DH: Not particularly. I chose musicians based on my sense of how having played with each of them in different contexts and how it felt to work with them. I didn’t go out looking for someone who plays the way Kris Davis plays. I heard her, specifically. And we did some duo playing together first. I loved that experience and wanted to do more with her. Nothing happened for a year or so until I had the idea for this idea group, and she was instantly on my mind, as were Nasheet and Jaleel, for the same reasons. They all bring sensitivity to the music and have a wide range of concepts that they can deal with. 

PG: The first album under your own name, Conference of the Birds (ECM, 1973), was a quartet album as well. How do you feel your approach to writing for quartets, specifically, has changed the most over the last four decades?

DH: I think, generally, your writing follows how you play. Or at least it does with me. I remember years ago, Anthony Braxton gave me some advice about composing. He said, “Just write the way you play.” And that greatly focused me on the symbiotic relationship between playing and composing. As my playing has changed, I’ve looked for different compositional settings that allow me to work on myself as a player in terms of dealing with different aspects of musical language. Often, how I write is also informed by the people I’m playing with.  I seek to provide them with a vehicle that would hopefully give them something they can use to expand their creative ideas. There is a certain range of different elements that I’m looking at when choosing the material that will work for a specific combination of players. 

PG: Because your groups seem so dependent on who is in them, do you see any thread that runs through your quartets from Conference of the Birds through Extensions (ECM, 1989) to Prism (Dare2, 2013) to the current group? They certainly all sound different.

DH: I think what all those different quartets have in common is the presence of diverse ideas. I think it’s nice to have a range of different approaches represented within a group. It gives a broader point of view on the music, and each person influences everyone else in the group. When I listen to the way Nasheet plays, it makes me relate to music in a certain way that makes me work on some different things and may make me approach music a little differently. The same goes for any musician in any of my groups. As far as diversity, I’m not looking for people who are all on the same page in terms of ideas. That would be a very, very boring kind of setting to me. I like the tension between different approaches. 

I mean, you mentioned Conference of the Birds. It has two different styles of saxophone players, Sam Rivers and Anthony Braxton. I played with both a lot and have been inspired by playing with both of them, along with Barry Altschul on drums. There was a lot of diversity in how each of those excellent players played and approached the music. I think that added something compared to if I had two saxophone players who played the same way. 

PG: In terms of adding a diverse approach to an instrument, your first bass was made for you by your uncle out of thin wooden tea crates. Do you feel starting on that instrument has at all impacted your approach to bass performance compared to if you had started on a more traditional instrument?

DH: I wasn’t performing then, of course.  I was about eight years old and had seen a Skiffle band on television. Skiffle was kind of a hybrid of American folk music with different styles of music. It was very rhythmic. The band I saw had someone with an instrument made out of a tea chest, a broomstick handle, and a piece of string. At that time, I hadn’t thought about playing bass at all. But I asked my uncle, who was pretty good at making things, if he could make me one like the instrument I saw. He made it, and I had a lot of fun trying to get tuning out of it. As you pulled on the broomstick, you changed the note as the string got tighter. But, no, starting with that instrument didn’t impact my playing the bass. 

The first bass I played was when I was about thirteen and in a band. We had three guitars. I was playing rhythm guitar in the band, and we wanted a bass player. I immediately volunteered to play the part and have enjoyed playing bass ever since. 

PG: So, you started playing bass around 1959. Five years later, you moved from your home city of Wolverhampton [, England] to London. After four years in London, in 1968, Miles [Davis] found you. You ultimately became part of his “Lost Quintet.” The group was never formally recorded. Do you have any sense as to why Miles did not take the quintet into the studio?

DH: I think Miles’ concept for studio recordings wasn’t to document the band that was touring with him. His concept included a lot of other layers of instruments beyond just the touring group, which is what you hear on Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970). 

The first recording I was on with Miles was Filles de Kilimanjaro (Columbia, 1969), which featured two different rhythm sections. One was with Herbie [Hancock], Ron [Carter], and Tony [Williams], and the other was Chick [Corea], myself, and Tony. That was the only small group thing we did of course, and both sections featured Wayne Shorter on saxophone. After that, John McLaughlin came to New York, and we worked with Miles on In a Silent Way (Columbia, 1969) and then Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970). Both of those albums were with larger groups because that is where Miles’ interest in recording was at the time. As for the “Lost Quintet” – I’m not too fond of that title, to be honest- fortunately it had a lot of live performances that were documented and subsequently came out. So it wasn’t all that lost. 

PG: Since you mentioned In a Silent a Way, that album was assembled from a three-hour session on February 18, 1969. Do you have any particular memories of that recording session? 

DH: Well, it was something like all the other recording sessions in a sense. Miles had something he wanted to work on in the studio and a process of working with, often, some minimal material and then evoking creative input from the other musicians- sometimes by talking to them, and sometimes by just listening to what they were doing with that material – and then using that as part of the material itself. It was a working process. In a Silent Way wasn’t any different. But you could hear the music transitioning, as it always did with Miles. He never stopped doing that. 

PG: Related to how Miles kept developing and changing, there is a fairly random question. Miles started incorporating rock influences into his music with Filles de Kilimanjaro in 1968. But there is a narrative – you can hear it in the Ken Burns documentary Jazz (PBS, 2001) – that Miles developed Bitches Brew and much of his work in the ‘70s from seeing the response Sly and the Family Stone got at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1969. As someone who was part of that ‘69 Newport performance, do you have any thoughts on those claims?

DH: I can’t say exactly. I don’t know what was going on in Miles’ mind. I do think there was an acute awareness on his part of contemporary music. I remember several things that he brought to my attention that were part of the contemporary music developments that were happening then. Sly was a part of it. [Jimi] Hendrix was a part of that as well. There were also all kinds of other influences at work. There have been interviews with Miles where he speaks of the fact that these things don’t happen in isolation. I think that goes for every musician; none of us work in isolation. You listen, you learn, and you absorb things. Then you put them into your music, in whatever form it takes. 

Miles was also listening to classical music. I remember that I used to go to his house on 77th Street here in New York, and he was playing some organ pieces by [Francis] Poulenc, a French composer at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.  Miles was somebody who was constantly thinking about feeding the fire and keeping the creative fire burning. 

Miles also said it very clearly in an interview quite late in his life. He was asked something about how his music was always changing. And he said that a big part of that was his surrounding himself with certain players who could carry the music forward, and he molded to where they were going. He worked with the material that he heard the other musicians playing. When he left the stage [during performances], he would stand on the side of the stage, listening. He wasn’t behind the stage hanging out or chatting with other people, then coming out and playing again. That is why you see some pictures of him standing on the side, listening. He knew he wasn’t working in isolation. But he was also a genius with a vision and knew how to bring people together to work on that vision. 

PG: After leaving Miles, you formed the band Circle with Chick Corea, Anthony Braxton, and Barry Altschul. How did that group come together? 

DH: Chick, Barry, and I had been doing some trio work, outside of me and Chick playing with Miles. Occasionally, we would do a gig in New York, or something. One of our gigs was at the Village Vanguard in 1970. We had just finished making the record, The Song of Singing (Blue Note, 1971), a trio record [released under Chick’s name.]  At the Vanguard,  I think we were playing opposite Roy Haynes’ band as part of a double bill. After the set, Anthony Braxton, who had been listening to us, came up to us to talk about what he’d heard and how he’d liked it. We invited him to come and join us for a jam session. Chick and I each had our own lofts in a building on 19th Street. Anthony ended up spending an afternoon playing with Barry, Chick, and me. And that was at the beginning of the quartet. After a couple of last gigs in New York with Miles that summer, Chick and I both decided to leave and start working on Circle. 

PG: In the early 1970s, you also made a duo recording with Derek Bailey called Improvisations for Cello and Guitar (ECM, 1971). How did that album come about? 

DH: I moved back to London during the Circle period. We all moved to Europe for a while because we had a hard time getting enough work for the band. We knew that if we went to Europe, there would be more acceptance of the music we were playing at the time. We managed to work as a band to develop the music. We also recorded the French radio concert we did in Paris, which was released as Paris-Concert (ECM, 1972). That record was the result of all of the work we were doing in Europe to develop the music. 

Anyway, while we were in Europe, I lived in London. Chick stayed at the Scientology Center in the South of England, and Barry and Anthony were in Paris. While in London, I started reconnecting with some old friends and playing with them. And Derek was one of them. 

PG: Circle ended with Chick Corea going to form Return to Forever. You are friends with John McLaughlin, who had the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And when you and Chick were with Miles, he was just starting to get into his electric period. You went more into an avant-garde space at that time. Did you ever feel any pressure back then to move towards jazz-rock?

DH: Not me personally. I think Chick’s reason for leaving Circle was because he wanted to play some music that included that concept more. I remember him saying he was quite interested in what was happening with John McLaughlin’s band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and I think that made him think about some other options for himself. But I was on a track of playing in the way I wanted to play at that time, and so, I continued on. 

We’d moved out to the West Coast to [Los Angeles] with the band for a few months and were planning to stay there for a while. After Chick left the band, I eventually worked my way back to New York. By the end of that year, 1971, I began playing with Sam Rivers. Well, actually my full-time gig was with Stan Getz. But Sam had his loft in New York and we started playing there. And after about a year to a year and a half with Stan, I left his band and started playing with Sam in his trio and big band. 

Then I started working a lot with Braxton. After Circle broke up, Braxton moved to Paris for a while. When I was working with Sam, he came back to New York and got a record contract with Arista. And that led to his quartet with Kenny Wheeler, Barry, and myself. So those are my two main activities for the first half of the 1970s. 

PG: As far as Sam Rivers, the two of you recorded together a lot over the years. What do you feel it was about his musical ideas that resonated so well with your own?

DH: The thing with Sam was that he wanted you to bring whatever you had into the music. We were working in small groups like the trio and the quartet. [Tubaist] Joe Daly joined us some years later and started playing with the band in the second half of the ‘70s. 

In all of the small groups we had, we didn’t play written music. It was all improvised. That was very important to me at the time. I deeply enjoyed working with a blank slate. And with Sam, it got to a point where it felt like the music sounded like it was written, at times. As you play together more and more, the language of the music develops, and you start to have ways of structuring it and making different creative moments. I love that openness. 

PG: To go back to Conference of the Birds, Sam was on that recording as well. A friend wanted to ask you if you were to reconvene a version of that group with Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul, who you feel could fit well in Sam’s role. But it sounds like, because your groups are so specific to who is in them, you could never actually make a version of that group without him. 

DH: Ohh, you can’t go back. Miles knew that. Things happen at a certain time for a reason. And it’s also very rare that a reunion band can capture the magic of the original project. I have long-term relationships with different musicians, as you know, but specific projects are of a specific time. Sometimes, some relationships continue on and on, but the music’s in a state of change all the time. I don’t want to go back and recreate something that had such a significant meaning to me at a time in my life when we first did it. 

PG: That makes sense. To ask you about one other thing you did in the 1970s- in 1972, you played at the Village Vanguard with [Thelonious] Monk in one of his last public performances. What was that experience like?

DH: Incredible. What an opportunity to have a chance to play with him. To be part of a rhythm section with Thelonious Monk is something special because of the way he comped and how he timed his playing. Of course, there is the material itself. His compositions are so iconic and incredibly unique. Luckily, he was gentle with me. [laughing].  We didn’t play some of the more obscure pieces. I knew quite a lot of his music from having played it with other people and from listening to his records and playing along with them. It was a thrill to play with him. 

We did a couple of concerts around that time, but that was during the period I was working with Stan Getz, and I had made a commitment to Stan play in his band. [Stan] also helped me a lot with my immigration status so I could get permanent residency in America. But I valued that experience with Monk. It’s a moment in my life that was very special.

We continue our conversation with Dave Holland here.

The Dave Holland New Quartet with Kris Davis, Jaleel Shaw, and Nasheet Waits will be performing at Smoke Jazz Club from September 4, 2024 to September 8, 2024. Tickets are available here. You can also live-stream the performances. More information about Dave Holland is available on his website.