An Interview with Dave Holland

An Interview with Dave Holland

Date Posted: September 02 2009

Written By: chicago jazz

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Bassist Dave Holland was born in Wolverhampton, England, on October 1, 1946. Holland taught himself how to play stringed instruments, beginning at four on the ukulele, graduating to guitar and later bass. At fifteen, he quit school to pursue the professional music life in a Top 40 band. Eager to learn more about playing bass, Holland gravitated to jazz players and heard two LPs––one with Ray Brown backing Oscar Peterson, and another with West Coast bassist Leroy Vinnegar. Within a week, Holland traded in his bass guitar for an acoustic bass and began practicing with the records.

Holland’s most significant non-bassist mentor was Miles Davis, who caught the young bassist at Ronnie Scott’s one evening in 1968. Holland’s stint with Davis included bass work on the seminal fusion recording, Bitches Brew. During the 1970s and ‘80s Holland enjoyed many fruitful associations with a range of musicians, including Chick Corea, Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, Anthony Braxton, Betty Carter, Hank Jones, Billy Higgins, Steve Coleman, Kenny Wheeler and Julian Priester.


Much of Holland’s current work has its roots in the mid-nineties when Holland formed a quintet with saxophonist Chris Potter, trombonist Robin Eubanks, vibes player Steve Nelson and drummer Nate Smith. This band formed the nucleus of many of Holland’s future projects, including the critically acclaimed Dave Holland Big Band.
Now in his sixties, multi-Grammy winner Holland is in the prime of his career. Armed with a slew of current and upcoming projects, including a new state-of-the-art website, Holland shows no signs of slowing down.


Chicago is fortunate to have Holland in town twice in two months––with his big band at the Jazz Festival on Labor Day weekend, and at Symphony Center on October 30 with his newly formed group, Overtone.


Chicago Jazz Magazine: Early in your career didn’t you have a brief stint with Thelonious Monk?

Dave Holland: Yeah, it was quite brief, but it was very memorable. I was working with Stan Getz for about a year, year-and-a-half, and I think it was around 1972, 1973, and Thelonious Monk had the same manager as Stan, Jack Whittemore. And Jack called and asked me if I could do some gigs with Monk, and I said, “Of course. I would love to.” I was tied up with Stan, but I said I’d check with him and see what I could do. And I’d been with Stan Getz’s band for a while; we were working with a director and writing music for it. I had a commitment to that. Stan also helped me with my immigration situation, and helped me get my full-time residency here. So I was working with Stan and I stuck to that, but I got to play a week at the Vanguard with Monk too.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: How did you get hooked up with Getz?

Dave Holland: I had moved back to New York state––I had been out in California with a group we had with Chick Corea, Barry Altschul and Anthony Braxton. After that group dissolved I came back to New York, at the end of seventy-one, and I moved to upstate New York in seventy-two. Stan was forming a new band and called me and asked me to be a part of it. And that’s how it started. And he had some great musicians in the group of course, as always.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Is it true, the famous story of Miles Davis discovering you in Ronnie Scott’s?

Dave Holland: Yeah, I was a fairly regular player at the Ronnie Scott club. Sometimes I’d play with the featured artist, and sometimes I’d be in the support group that used to always be there. And I was there doing a gig in the support group opposite the Bill Evans Trio. And Bill, of course, was a long time friend of Miles, as he was of Jack DeJohnette and Eddie Gomez. I was in the band playing with a very fine vocalist, Elaine Delmar, and it was a piano trio led by Pat Sly, who was a very fine English pianist. We were playing some nice arrangements and standards and things like that, and Miles came into the club and stayed the whole evening. And towards the end of the evening I got a message conveyed by “Philly Joe” Jones that Miles wanted me to join his band, and it stunned me. I thought he was joking. And he persuaded me that it was for real, and that’s how it started.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Miles was known for always seeking out fresh new talent.

Dave Holland: Yeah, I think that’s the case with several musicians of that stature that I know. They are always looking and listening to the community, checking out what’s going on and staying in touch with the young players that are coming up and checking what they are doing. I think it helps you as you get older as a musician, staying in touch with things––how they are developing and the language that is developing. The new thinking that is being developed in the music scene, I am certainly very interested to see what’s going on. In fact I’m involved with two education arrangements right now, which I enjoy very much for that reason––I get to hear young players and check out what they are doing.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Is one of them is the New England Conservatory?

Dave Holland: Yes, the New England Conservatory in Boston; and the other is the Birmingham Conservatoire at Birmingham University in England.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: You have time in residence at both schools?

Dave Holland: Yes, I do a week at each school each semester, and during the year it amounts to two full weeks. During each week I do lectures and presentations and things like that.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: What’s your opinion of the young musicians coming through the ranks these days?

Dave Holland: I’m very inspired and encouraged by what I hear. As always, you’ve got a generation that’s come up being inspired by this music. I think that this music has such great emotional strength and a great heritage behind it. I think young people, as I was, are drawn into it on an emotional level, and just love the music. And I think that continues to happen, and it continues to inspire young people to really dedicate their time and their effort to being the best musicians they can be. And you know, I hear a lot of very interesting original music being written, which is a big change from when I was coming up. I mean there were a lot of composers then, but now I feel people are really seeing composing as one aspect of your work as a musician, which not only teaches you, and also develops your concepts and ideas.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: How has your concept of jazz changed from, say, the sixties through today? Has it always been the same or has your thinking about jazz shifted?

Dave Holland: Well it’s certainly shifted in some ways, and in some ways it’s stayed the same. The way it’s stayed the same is that my love of jazz has always been the dialogue and communication and the social context of the music, and the sharing of both with the musicians and the audience. In that respect, that’s still a big part of what I love. I love bands that are interacting, that are constantly creating a new dialogue between each other––that’s what really inspires me and interests me in the music, and it’s been that way from the beginning, since the very first Oscar Peterson Trio records with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen. It’s the interactive quality and, of course, the emotional strength of the music. Also, though, the context of the music has changed some over the years, and the things that I’m looking at––the things that grab my interest in the music––have changed over the years depending on my development as a musician––what I feel is the direction I need to go in to develop the music and to develop my own playing. Those contexts change, partly because of your experiences with different players and different musicians you run into who introduce you to different ideas––and I’ve had the opportunity to play with musicians from different cultures. I’ve gotten to play with people from the Arabic cultures, from the Indian cultures, and recently from the Spanish gypsy culture, and all these experiences have influenced both what I write and what I play. So that changes the context of what ideas I work with. But you learn that some things remain the same––I still love a great bass line, I still like a strong melody, I’m just trying to integrate, really, all the things that I like into the music I play now. I try to integrate the freedom of the open form music I was playing in the sixties and seventies, the structure that Ellington and Strayhorn bring to their music. I’m just trying to live up to those standards.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Speaking of conceptual approaches, you started a big band that’s quite a departure from the traditional big band. For starters, you don’t use piano. What prompted you to put a big band together and what approach did you take?

Dave Holland:Well, the initial idea happened a long time ago. I started thinking about writing for big band in the eighties. I attempted a few charts and did a performance at the Public Theater in New York once with a large group. But that was still in the initial stages of development. What finally happened was that I got offered a residency at the Montreal Festival in 2000, and in the residency you have the opportunity to present several concerts during a week there. And that’s when the idea came to me that maybe now was the time to start the big band. I approached it with some trepidation. I had such big heroes, as far as writing for big band, in the shape of Ellington and Strayhorn and Gil Evans and Kenny Wheeler, so many great, great people I admire, and I wasn’t quite sure what I had to offer, but I decided to give it a try. It was a stage of my life where I felt if I didn’t do it now, I would never do it. So I took some compositions that I had written and started developing them for big band. That’s how it started. I expected for it to just exist for the festival, maybe do a gig or two, but it worked really well. The concert went well, and we decided to record it. And following the recording, we got other things happening. The following year we got an invitation to commission a piece I had written, which ended up being part of the second album we did, which was called Overtime. The thing kind of got legs, as they say. It started to have life of it’s own and people wanted to hear it so we took it out on the road several times for a couple of big tours. We are still working with the band––we haven’t done any major touring, but we usually manage to do a few gigs each year. We did the Playboy Festival at the Hollywood Bowl last month and we’ll be at Chicago, of course, in September, so it’s a project that stays relevant to me. And we’ve also managed to maintain the same personnel in the band, which means a lot to me. As you may know, I like to keep a group together and the kind integrity that gives the music and the character that is in the music when people really have a chance to get to know each other and to individualize the phrasing. You know, so much you hear is brought to the table by the musicians themselves, the way they choose to phrase something or the sound somebody brings to the melody the way they play that particular melody, and it gets very personalized, so it’s nice to be able to keep the same personnel as much as we can for the gig and I’m glad to say that for the most part we’ve managed to do that.

Chicago Jazz Magazine:It looks like you’ll be back in Chicago in October at Symphony Center with your longtime cohort Chris Potter, as well as with Jason Moran and Eric Harland.

Dave Holland:The group is called Overtone, and this fall is really the beginning of the group. We’ve got some compositions everyone has written that we’ve been performing, and I’m sure we will plan a recording down the line with this group. We’ve all played together in different situations––they are all musicians I have a great respect for. Jason Moran did a tour in the quintet for a while when Steve Nelson was not able to make one of the tours, and Eric Harland has of course been working in the sextet and recorded Pass It On with us in the past year, and Chris and I have been associated in the quintet and many different projects together since the nineties. I actually appeared on his record first. We did a record in ninety-four, I’m thinking, that was one of Chris’s early records. And Chris and Jason have played together, of course, and Jason and Eric go back to the early days in Texas, in Houston. They’ve known each other for a very long time. In fact I think they both came to New York as part of Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead program. That’s one of the first times I met Eric was around that time, in the last year or two of Betty’s life. We also did a memorial concert for Betty after she died where Eric was there, and the drummer who is currently with me in the quintet, Nate Smith, who was also one of the members of the Jazz Ahead program. Yeah, she had an amazing ear for young players.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: How does your approach to bass playing differ when you are with the big band as opposed to smaller groups?

Dave Holland:I think in the big band I assume more of the supporting role, but one of my ideas in the big band is to really free the rhythm section up a bit, I don’t do a lot of detail writing for them. I treat them more like they are in a small group, where they are much freer to interpret the music as they feel at any given point. But there’s certain role the bass has in the big band that has to be observed in order to be effective. And with the smaller the group, the more intimate the music becomes, the more intimate dialogue can happen. Of course you can create duet moments and trio moments in the big band, there is room for that in the large group. But everyone gets to solo more in the small group, everyone gets to play more and improvise more in a small group. And of course the small group doesn’t need as much written material. A big band needs a little more organization generally. Although you can approach it from lots of different points of view, with the small group you just need enough material to hold it together and to give it a direction, and then you can pretty much fill in the gaps with whatever the players want to do. I guess that’s the difference as a bass player too.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: In the big band, you’ve chosen to go with vibes rather than a piano, although maybe it’s not an either-or situation.

Dave Holland: Yeah, I wouldn’t put it that way. I know it sort of appears it’s this instead of this, or whatever, but I don’t really look at it that way. Because you don’t say I have a trombone instead of a tuba, you know. I choose the people for how they play and not just what they play. I don’t just go out and say, I need a vibraphone player, let me see who’s out there, and listen to a bunch of people and land on Steve Nelson––didn’t go that way. I’d played with Steve in the early nineties and had known him before that from listening to him on gigs, and we played together and we made a connection. At that point I hadn’t been using vibes––I had a guitarist in my previous group, Kevin Eubanks, and I did want to continue using a chordal instrument, but I wasn’t sure what. I have tended to shy away from using piano, just because the rhythm section has a slightly more open sound with an instrument like guitar or vibes, you don’t have such dense chordal work necessarily. But I have to say if Thelonious Monk had been available I might have considered it! [laughs]

Chicago Jazz Magazine: When you are not busy with your music, do you have any passions or hobbies that you like to engage in?

Dave Holland: Honestly my family is a big part of my life and I enjoy doing things with them, whatever that may be––hanging out or going on trips. I like to read, I like to watch the occasional movie. You know, I can’t say there’s any big thing. I don’t really have time to pursue another hobby full-time. Geographically, I’m not in one space a for any length of time. I do come home, but that may be three or four weeks and then we’re off for a month. So that makes it hard to do those other things. I love nature; I live in the Hudson Valley. I’ve always liked to be around natural beauty.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: What types of books do you like to read?

Dave Holland: Well, a few different things. The most recent book is by Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine, I just finished that. I’ve been interested in reading some historical books, like The Team of Rivals and Mary, Queen of Scots.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: How do you view the difference between the English jazz scene and the American jazz scene?

Dave Holland: Well, I’m not really an expert on the English jazz scene at this point. I do go there twice a year to teach. But what I’m seeing amongst the young players is very strong, and also there are a lot of people forging their own way and writing some very original music. There’s also been a very strong group of musicians in England––a good tradition of music there. The opportunities to play are not enough so most players have to travel outside of England to find work. England is a small country with limited support for the arts, especially jazz. Considering the circumstances it’s still doing well. There is a much bigger support for teaching here in the states and it’s run more on a commercial basis. There’s not as much funding as in the European countries for the arts. And you don’t get as much exposure on TV and radio here as you do in Europe. You know, there are great musicians everywhere––everywhere I go I meet musicians just as inspired and fired up about that. The main thing I would say is England is a smaller country and scene. And you also don’t have the same cultural influences that you have in America. It doesn’t have the African American community, which of course is a big originating point for this music and still is. You don’t get that cultural context. And also the Latin music––like Puerto Rican and Cuban music––that you get in New York and other parts of the country certainly has its influence on jazz players here, whereas in England you don’t have any of that. But there are other forces going on in England, like players going back to English heritage and those musical traditions and weaving them into the improvisational and the jazz context. It’s the wonderful thing about jazz––it’s a huge umbrella and there’s always room for another version of how to do it. I think I really celebrate that. I like the diversity and variety you have in this music and the inclusiveness of it.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Musically speaking, what’s on the Dave Holland horizon?

Dave Holland: Well, there’s two important things coming out: one is the launching of a new website. We’ve had a site, daveholland.com, for years, but we’ve got a new flash page when you go to daveholland.com announcing the new site that will be up soon. It’s really going to be a big change for me, where you have the opportunity to download music, and download sheet music and scores, there will be videos available, extensive documentation, photo galleries, all kinds of things. There’s going to be solo transcriptions for those fanatics who want that. [laughs] We’ve had mail-order sheet music and scores for several years now for schools and students to order and learn. But this is great having it on the website because now you can order it and immediately you can download it and it will come out of your printer within minutes of you having ordered it. And we are going to have an archive series of recordings from what we’ve been doing for the last four years––we’ve been recording all our live concerts and gigs and things like that, so that will be made available. And right after the release of the website, we are going to release our first web release which is a new record of an octet called Pathways. And that will be out in September.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Give us a little more detail about Pathways.

Dave Holland: It’s the quintet, which is Chris and Robin, Nate, Steve and myself, and we’ve supplemented that with three of the members of the big band, Gary Smulyan on baritone, Antonio Hart, alto saxophone, and Alex Sipiagin on trumpet. So the frontline is three saxes and two brass.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: And this will be an online-only release?

Dave Holland:It’s going to be exclusively online for the first couple of months, and then it will be available at all the usual sources after that. I should mention also there will be a new record next year, which will be the flamenco project, mostly a family of Spanish gypsy flamenco players that I met. It’s a six-piece group with three guitars, two cajon, and bass. And we recorded that in March, so that should be released next year. So that’s the upcoming “stuff.”

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Sounds like as usual you have your hands in many different pies.

Dave Holland: Yeah, let’s hope I haven’t taken on too much stuff [laughs]. The website I’ve gotten a lot of help with, but it’s also taken quite a bit of time. It’s fascinating actually. I’m learning so much of what is possible now with the new website and all the new technologies that are available to us now. I think it’s a very exciting period for those of us who want to be independent and have more control of our music.
There’s wireless access in lots of places now, and with the iPhone now you can even carry around a small PDA and access information like that. I think it’s a great thing. Of course some of us are still sentimental about the old LPs and the big covers and all that, but time’s moving on. And I think one of the great things about this is


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