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Globe and Mail, Feature >>
It's all about the players, says the veteran jazzman, whose quintet features an unusual lineup of instruments and some of the finest talents working in jazz today.
J.D, CONSIDINE reports
Mr. Holland's Opus
As jazz combos go, the Dave Holland Quintet boasts an unusual lineup. Instead of the standard array of trum pet, saxophone, piano, bass and drums--set-up that has been standard since the days of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie-- Holland's band relies on saxophone, trombone, vibraphone, bass and drums.
But by Holland's reckoning, that seems odd only if you look at the lineup in terms of instrumentation. If you look at the specific players he works with, then it's a different story altogether.
"I always say that the reason have a trombone in the band is be cause of Robin Eubanks," he says on the phone from his home in up state New York. "It wasn't that I had this generic idea of a trombone, and then who can I get to do it.
"The same thing applied to vibraphone. It never occurred to me to use vibraphone until I met Steve Nelson, and then I was so blown away by his approach to the instrument and his creativity that I just knew I wanted to do something with him.
"It's very much who are the play ers, and what's their approach to the instrument," he says. "That's the primary thing."
It doesn't hurt that the players Holland works with are among the best in jazz today. In addition to Eubanks and Nelson, his quintet (which performs at the Danforth Music Hall tomorrow night) includes Chris Potter, a gifted young saxophonist whose credits range from the Dave Douglas Quartet to Steely Dan, and drummer Nate Smith, whom Holland discovered during a teaching stint at Virginia Commonwealth University.
At 60, Holland has been working as a bassist longer than Potter or Smith have been alive. But he comes by his belief in young talent naturally, for he was all of 21 when Miles Davis hired him to replace Ron Carter in his band. Holland had been studying double bass at the Guildhall School in London, and had been thinking about trying his luck in New York when he got the call in July of 1968.
The next thing he knew, he says, "I was in New York at the beginning of August playing with his band at the Count Basic Club in Harlem. That was quite a surprise to me, and probably even more to my American friends, who suddenly saw me onstage with Miles." Holland played with Davis on the breakthrough fusion albums In Silent Way and Bitches Brew, as well as several live recordings (including a pair of dates at the legendary Fillmore West and Fillmore East). But he left the group in 1970 because he wanted to pursue a different kind of experimentalism. He returned to Europe, recorded an album of duets with English bassist Barre Phillips, joined Davis bandmate Chick Co- rea in the avant-garde jazz quartet Circle, and in 1972 recorded his first date as a leader, Conference of the Birds. By the end of the decade, he was firmly established on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the leading players on his instrument.
Still, he seems most fulfilled as bandleader, in part because of the opportunities it,affords for writing music, "I think there's still a portion of the jazz audience that wonders why we don't play standards and the classic repertoire," he says. "I always explain that one of the opporunities of having a working group, one of the great benefits of that, is to be able to work on original music.
"So I've always made a point with the groups, ever since I started them in '82, to play and focus on original music that myself and the other members have written. think it makes the situation unique and special in that way, and also it makes the music tailor-made for the people that are playing it.
" Naturally, after more than two decades, that adds up to a lot of tunes. "We do have a large book of music at the moment," he admits. Currently, the quintet is playing fair amount of material from its newest CD, Critical Moss, which Holland produced for his own Dare2 label. "But it always turns out that there are some older songs that are con- tinually developing when you play them, and those are the ones that you go back to" he says. "There's one song called The Balance that was the opening track of the album Points of View. We rerecorded it again, five or six years later, on the Live at Birdland CD, and 1 think the comparison of those two interpret ations of the song show a big difference.
"And we still find ourselves going back to that song. It's quite a short form it's only eight bars but it's a song that seems to have one of those bottomless pits of possibility. Some songs are like that."
The Dave Holland Quintet plays the Danforth Music Hall Theatre in Toronto on Oct. 13 at 7:30 p.m. (416-778-8163) 10/12/06
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