all about jazz: Having won more polls and awards than any jazz artist in the modern era, can you feel the breath of expectations over your shoulder?

DAVE HOLLAND: Work goes on, that is the way I feel. I try to not be preoccupied with that side of it. The good side of all the recognition is that it is giving us more opportunities to perform and bring our music to people. The other side of it, I am very much a realist. The work has to go on and as a musician, you still have to write music and practice and get ready for the concert you're about to play. You have to focus on the work at hand. That is the key for me. I remember Herbie Hancock telling me once that one of the things you do have to combat as an artist is the whole thing of expectations, both in yourself and in what other people look to you for. The downfall of that is you go on stage trying to prove something and it takes you out of reality and to play with the people you're playing with. I think as long as you keep that in mind, it is good advice.

aaj: Like Ellington and Mingus, you prefer to write to the specific strengths

of your band,

DH: My composing has always been related to the improvisational setting.  Pretty much from the beginning of writing music, it was always connected to who I was playing with and the band I was playing with at the time and what musical needs and ideas that I had for that setting. That has been the motivating part of it. I am trying to write music that is fun to play as an improviser. I've never attempted to write something that is a straight, purely written composition. To be perfectly honest, that's not something that interests me. I'm interested in trying to create vehicles for myself and the musicians that I am playing with. Very often, that is the starting point, to think about what the band needs and what kind of piece would be interesting for us to use at this stage in the band's development. Being an improviser myself, there is a very important symbiotic relationship between your playing and your writing. I think Coltrane demonstrated that very clearly in the pieces he wrote for himself and his group, which contained the seeds of the ideas that he was working on as a player and giving him a vehicle through which he could explore those concepts.

aaj: So the quintet's book changes along with the personnel.

DH: We made an exception with the big band, where we revisited some of the pieces of the early quintet, which I scored for the big band. I felt sufficient time had gone by to where reworking them for a completely new setting and expanding on the themes was an interesting starting point to write for the big band. I find some compositions do come back to be used again. When we started the quintet with Julian and Kenny and Steve and Smitty, we were playing a couple of tune from Conference of the Birds that I had reworked for the quintet, but most of the time, you're right. What I am trying to do is bring new material that suits the style and the playing of the music right now. In order to do that, it requires new material.

aaj: Overtime features a lengthy suite commissioned by the Monterey Jazz

Festival.

DH: We received the commission early on in the year and I began work on mapping out thematic material. Over the six months prior to the performance of the piece, I was working on ideas and developing it. The final movement of it, "Happy Jammy" remained to be finished. I returned from Europe on September 10, flew into Newark. I got up in the morning, September 11, to finish "Happy Jammy" and went into the kitchen to make tea and turned the radio on and heard the drama unfold. I was unable to work for a number of days. Finally, by Saturday I wrote "Happy Jammy" under those circumstances. The reception at Monterey was extraordinary. It was such an emotionally charged event for a number of reasons. On the part of the band, with all the drama of the post-9-11 period, we weren't even sure planes would be flying. For a while, we weren't sure the festival would even go on. It had a great sense of purpose to it. Then of course we got to Monterey and played the big arena there and 8,000 people were there. I think they were feeling that this gathering was more than just a festival at this point. This was an affirmation of trying to continue on with our normal life in the face of this terrible tragedy. We played the suite and it was received with such an emotional outpouring from the audience, it was one of the most memorable moments of my life. You realize how important music is to bring us together.

aaj: Overtime is the first release on your own Dare2 label. Why initiate this now?

DH: The desire for independence. One of the issues that have always been important to me is the eventual ownership of my masters and the music.  Under the normal arrangements with a record company, once the record's made, the record is owned by the record company and the artist is paid a royalty rate on the sales. I wanted to create a situation where music that I was producing was going to be owned by myself and my family. The other issue is creative independence in terms of make choices to do things that were not able to scheduled under my arrangement with ECM. I had the opportunity to record on a regular basis, but I used those opportunities to document the working bands because that's what was the most important thing to get on record. But other things have come up over the years that I would be interested in getting on tape and documenting. We are also involved in live recording now. We have a mobile recording system to record. We are archiving quite a lot of material. The support that we're getting from the press and public right now makes it a possibility that we could do this and the big band album was a perfect opportunity to set this thing in motion and kick start the whole project.

aaj: Is a Circle reunion an option?

DH: I never have been that interested in reviving past projects. That was a special group. Circle was a special moment in time. But it happened because of the time it happened in and where we were all at in our life. It all contributed to making it the special thing that it was. You can't go back to that and have it be the same. You can't revisit something that belonged to a moment and expect it to have the same significance. I can't quite see what the creative motivation would be at this point. We're all in different places and times in our lives. Revisiting it may perhaps lessen the memory of how great it was when it was relevant at the time.

aaj: Much like Miles, your dedication to your evolution is admirable.

DH: Miles was certainly a great inspiration, as was Coltrane, in terms of that pursuit of their music and vision. They were moving forward rather than recreating what they had done in the past. Very simply as a player, it is what gets me going creatively - what is relevant now. I am most interested and most energized by the musicians I am playing with at the moment in the quintet and the big band and the musical direction that we've been pursuing over the last few years. That is what is exciting to me and what inspires me to play.

Recommended Listening:

David Holland Quartet Conference of the Birds ECM (1973)
Dave Holland/Sam Rivers Dave Holland/Sam Rivers IA (1976)