Dave Holland: History of the Harmonic Context

But anyway, I started playing bass guitar at that time. And as I got more involved in learning about bass, I naturally started to listen to acoustic bass players. The first people whose records I bought were Ray Brown and Leroy Vinnegar, and I owe a great deal to both in terms of giving me a really great insight into the beginnings of what I should work on as a player - sound and feel and supportiveness. Both are great supportive playersx as well as good soloists.

That was my beginning. Shortly after getting the records, I managed to persuade my mother, with not much persuasion, to put up the money to buy a nice, shiny plywood bass that was in the music store, and I started playing what's called upright bass probably when I was about 15. I did the first gigs on upright when I was 17. I got offered a summer season in a dance band up in the north of England, and I went up there for a summer, and spent the whole summer practicing like crazy and learning to read the book, which I mostly got through in the beginning by ear...

Unfortunately, he's not with us any longer. But he was a great orchestral player, a classical bass player. When I first started studying with him, he was the principal bassist in the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He and his father, who was also a bass player, used to do bass duets during World War Two on the radio, on the BBC. So he was a good soloist, and later went on to play in the BBC Symphony Orchestra. But he was the resident at the Guild Hall School of Music in London.

Of course, we're talking about the mid '60s, and we were all being influenced in various ways. When I moved to London in 1964, there was a sort of Traditional Jazz boom in London, New Orleans traditional music - it was on the charts and everything. So a lot of clubs were featuring that music, and those were my first gigs. From there I moved on into different mainstream bands and so on, playing more or less Swing and Bebop style - or trying to anyway! I started to really move into a more contemporary style of playing when I started playing with my so-called peers, as we started hearing these wonderful records coming out from the States - Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane's Love Supreme, Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures, Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity. All these records had a tremendous impact on me. Then from another side of what was happening in New York, the Miles Davis records that were coming out with the new rhythm section of Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter. The rhythmic and harmonic innovations that were happening in that group really were inspiring, and I was listening a lot and trying to learn from that.

This was the mix that was going on. And one of the great things that happened (if I could just wind this up) was that around 1966, Ronnie Scott, who for a long time had a club in London (he's a saxophone player), moved his location to another premises, and the old club was handed over to the young musicians to organize, seven nights a week. This is where we had the after-hours sessions and so on. So many bands were given birth in this situation, because now all these people I mentioned earlier had a club where we could really play. We used to perform there and also hang out there until six or seven in the morning playing music. It was a wonderful time, a wonderful time for inspiration and exchange and exploration.

Now, I wouldn't say it was a split, but something that happened during the early Sixties in Europe generally was that quite a number of European musicians who were initially quite strongly influenced by African-American music, or music that was coming out of America, felt really strongly that a European approach was needed to improvisation, and they looked to European classical music, to some extent ontemporary European classical music, for languages to use and so on. Out of this came a lot of different movements. Some were very emotional and very hard-playing, at very loud intensity and so on. Other players dealt with finer kind of crafting and so on. There was an attempt there. So there was quite a lot of discussion about whether, as Europeans, we really should be trying to get involved with American music.

As I said, I didn't really think about that. I was more concerned with just playing music. I didn't care where it came from or what it was about. I just wanted to be in something that was good and that had good intentions and sincerity, and as I said, I managed to get involved with a lot of different players. But that was an important development, and out of it came some amazingly interesting players. Evan Parker certainly is for me one of the leading players who has developed and grown and really found a place for his music to go. Derek Bailey is another English musician that I have a great deal of respect for. And many others.

But that I think was a significant, if you want to say "split" or change in people's thinking. Because up to that time, European music was very strongly based on African-American music.

Well, I got through the set somehow, and by the end of the set, I looked for Miles, but he'd left the club already and gone back to the hotel. I got home late that night, and called early the next morning to speak to him, but he'd left already for America. So I was left for a couple of weeks, not quite knowing what to think. Philly Joe told me that it was a serious offer, and I should just probably wait and see what happened.

A couple of weeks later, I got a call from Miles' manager, Jack Whittamore, a very lovely man. I was starting a week with Joe Henderson at Ronnie Scott's, and I got the call after I got back from the first night of the gig, a Tuesday. He said, "Miles is opening in New York on Friday at Count Basie's, and he really wants you to come and do the gig with him." I said, "Well, I've got to get my visa and everything together, but I'll do my best." He said, "Well, try to be here Thursday; the gig starts Friday." It was a three-week engagement opposite Max Roach's band. So I got everything together, and Thursday afternoon, I was in New York. I went to Herbie Hancock's house to just look at a couple of tunes with him that I wasn't really familiar with, and we did that for an hour or so. The next night I turned up at the club and we started. I guess having that opportunity was probably one of the most singular events that's happened to me. It was an experience that's been valuable and given me so much to work on and develop on since then.

One story I like to tell is, that night I had a couple of pieces of paper that I had written some chord changes on from the rehearsal with Herbie, and I had them sort of stuck inside the piano, just inside the harp, not on the stand but just inside. So at the end of the night, Miles talked to me for a minute, and then kind of smilingly he said, "And Dave, leave the music at home." Even my two little bits of music I couldn't hang onto. I had to take them home and memorize them so that I could come to the gig next night and not have any music up there. That was one of my first lessons, that as long as you've got paper up there, it's not going to be the same.

When I joined Miles' band, we were playing sort of the whole history of what he had been doing, the early work like "Milestones" and things that he'd recorded on Prestige, with the classic group with Paul Chambers and so on, and we were still playing some of that, but of course, in a different way, and then other things from the repertoire like "Footprints" and songs that were recorded by the other great quintet, with Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. So the music had this tension between the older style and the new style, and of course, the new music that Miles was bringing in, too, that had the influence of the Rhythm-and-Blues and the contemporary music scene at that time.

I mean, he did make some very pointed comments to me. I know Jack De Johnette and myself both feel that a lot of the most adventurous things that we did were not really documented on record, because a lot of the studio work was a first reading of a piece. Fortunately, there are a few examples of it coming out now. When I listen to what we were doing then, even though it was a long time ago, what is happening now is still connected to that in a lot of ways.

One of the records I like best from this period is Live From San Juan Des Antibes. When I listen to what we were doing on that record, I realize that although it was a long time ago, what is happening now is still connected to that in a lot of ways. I just did a gig last week in Boston with Jack DeJohnette and John Abercrombie, the Gateway Trio. We had a lot of fun, and as usual, took a lot of chances. Having come from that gig and then listening to this record, I heard a continuation in the tension between the form and the formality of the time and its sort of freeing-up, and treating time as an element of speed as well, of movement - not perhaps time in a strict sense as an ongoing pulse but something that has a freer element to it in some new ways. In some ways I wish I could go back and do some of the stuff with Miles from my current point of view, because I feel now we are a little more grounded than we were then. We were sort of jumping out into the deep end. And I hear a lot of almost disrespect, ha-ha, for the form in some ways! Not in a conscious way, but I was focused on freeing-up the role of the bass and trying to play the instrument much more in a sort of dialogue sense with the rest of the band.

Anyway, I don't know exactly when it was, but at some point Miles kind of got me back on the ground again. He came up to me very quietly one night, and just said, "Dave, you know, you are a bass player." It was one of those things which resounds in your mind. I came away from that realizing that perhaps I was neglecting some fundamental aspects of the instrument which were actually quite beautiful and that I should pay attention to. And since then, I think I've tried to combine stretching, let's say, the role of the instrument with its fundamental support role of creating a reference point for the other instruments to work from. Objects which are moving in a very free fashion have more meaning sometimes when they're in reference to something which is a little more stable, for instance, because you can see the relationships more clearly. I don't know if that makes sense. But the bass can often create that point of reference harmonically, rhythmically, as can the drums, which allows the other instruments to have that kind of freedom and still make formal sense.

There's moments on this record where I say to myself, "You know, I could have perhaps given a little bit more of that reference point to it." But the music has a very exciting feel to it. It's a sense of discovery, a sense of taking a lot of chances. The other thing I notice, of course, is the formality of the tunes and the way we're stretching them, and the response of the rhythm section to that.

I mean, it's hard now to go back to 1969 and think about what was going on, especially for people who weren't living then or experiencing the things that were happening then. But there were a tremendous amount of changes going on, not just in the music, but socially and politically. There was a kind of breaking-loose of a lot of traditions and almost a disrespect for a lot of traditions. I think that was reflected in a lot of the forms of music. I wouldn't say totally disrespect, but a need to perhaps break out of them again. Albert Ayler's music, Cecil Taylor's music, Ornette's music I think redefined language in the music, and maybe broke out of some the formalities that were going on before. I'm not saying one's better or worse or any of that. It's just a natural progression I think that happens in any art form.

I think your use of the word "deconstruct" is interesting, because we were taking the tunes apart, playing elements of them, using some very free rhythmic kind of elements mixed-in, jumping in and out of the time, not feeling like the time was a compelling thing that had to be kept going, but could be played and then opened up and then come back to, and like that. The same with the form. Sometimes we'd play strictly within the forms, but other times we'd go off on excursions, and then come back and refer back to the form.

That's something we continued doing after we left Miles. I think that aspect of the music was one of the compelling reasons why I was interested in the Circle band, and I think why Chick was at that time. We wanted to explore more of that. Towards the end of my tenure with Miles, I was playing a lot more bass guitar than acoustic bass. In fact, the last couple of trips out on the road I didn't even take the acoustic, because the music had kind of moved on, with a much stronger Rhythm-and-Blues element going on. First of all, just as an instrumentalist, I always felt for a long time that my voice was the acoustic bass, and I wanted to get back to that, and I wasn't happy with the idea of not playing it on gigs and so on. Also, the musical areas that I was interested in exploring at that time were, I think, gradually being replaced by the new directions that Miles wanted to go in. He wanted, I think, a more supportive backdrop from the rhythm section than I was prepared to give up at that time.

The other side of it for me is that in Circle I was able to continue my efforts to avoid certain conformities as a bass player, to almost exclude certain elements of time and rhythm that were associated with the tradition of the music, and transform them into some other type of rhythm and other type of elements. I was certainly influenced by that venturesome feeling of the time. As a young man, obviously, I wanted to be as at the cutting edge as possible, and I had a certain mindset that I see, looking back, where I was sort of consciously avoiding elements in my playing that actually were there, were part of my background as a player, and which since then I've allowed to let out.

But the other thing that happened, too, was that we were still playing some of the standard Jazz compositions, and tying that in with what we did with Miles. We were exploring opening up the structures of standard tunes, like "Nefertiti" and "There Is No Greater Love," that we kind of took apart, or disassembled, and reinterpreted using elements of our open form improvisation experience, but injecting it into the form of the standard tune.

To me, it was a very interesting situation to be playing with both these great players. I remember one time Tony and I did a duo concert at a place called Environ, which was a loft that was active in the city in the Seventies; he turned up the day before with forty pages of written music for me to look at. Whereas Sam's thing was we'd just pretty much get on the stand and start. So fairly extreme, but as I said, both really challenging situations. I felt they stretched me in different ways, basically.

Sam encouraged me to use all the music. He would tell me, "Don't leave anything out. Play all of it. If you hear it and you don't play it, it will be gone. Play it when you hear it." He came up to me one night after I'd begun playing with him regularly in 1972 or '73, and said, "You know, Dave, you should maybe set up a vamp first to play," and I was like a little stunned. I wanted to just play, you know, as free as possible. He said, "Well, it's a part of the music." Sam got me back into that, thinking about trying to bring all the elements into the music, and I thank him for that. I think there's been a direct influence on the music that I've done since then from that experience.

I felt there was a very broad range of language that was available to Sam which was very personal. His rhythmic language especially, and his big-band writing, which unfortunately hasn't been heard enough, was tremendous, and had an influence on me and my writing certainly, certain things that I've written after working with him. The greatest thing was that he allowed me to just refer to any aspect of music that I wanted to. He was ready to jump into any type of situation that you set up for him, and of course, he also led us into some great musical areas. So it was a great workshop for me, of working out ideas.

Well, something came in out of the blue. I got very sick around this time, and was hospitalized, and out of action for about a year for something that was quite unexpected, but had quite a profound effect on me. I've heard other people talk about this, too, when they've had a life-threatening situation, that you come out of that with perhaps a certain clarity, and certainly an appreciation of having another chance at continuing on with your life.

So after that, in 1982, I was not about to waste any time in getting on with the business of putting a band together. I had always thought of Kenny Wheeler as being somebody I wanted to continue on with. I had known Kenny from the mid-Sixties in England. One of my first record dates had been with Kenny on a rather obscure album called Windmill Tilt, which is a beautiful big band album that he wrote in the mid-Sixties that was performed by the John Dankworth Band. John McLaughlin is on that record. So Kenny was somebody I had always had in mind to include in on a band.

Steve Coleman I had heard in my involvement with Sam Rivers. Sam had used Steve as the lead alto in his big band, and Steve was one of the really serious musicians in the band, interpreted the music well, and seemed to have an understanding of what that music was about. Julian Priester I met on a trip up to Seattle. I'd met him before, but we actually played together on a trip to Seattle that I made. And Smitty came in the band actually after another drummer, Steve Ellington, who did our first album. Steve was actually the drummer with Sam Rivers' band when I left Sam's band. So there were some connections with everybody. I met Smitty around 1983-84, at a jam session in New York, and I loved his playing; we rehearsed, and I asked him to join the band at that point.

Anyway, this is how the band came together. I wrote some new music for it, and I also decided that I wanted to use some music that I had recorded but never played very much, like some music on the Conference of the Birds album, we played some of those songs, and I made some arrangements for the quintet. It became a working band. It was difficult at the beginning economically. Also, everybody lived so far apart. Kenny lived in London, Julian lived in Seattle, and then the rest of us were in New York. But it was worth it. It was a band that had a sound, and there was a personality to it, I think, that developed. It was a great learning experience for me, too, and helped me with my writing, and helped me learn to take responsibility for things a little more.

I think when you mentioned bass players...

For me, players find each other. You gravitate towards the things that you need to do. And I've been lucky, as I say, and fortunate to be in a situation where I've heard certain players, and they've heard me and been interested in working together. Out of that we've made some very good music, I think.

So in view of that, I didn't want to just put a band together and, okay, now I'm going to start auditioning musicians to start another band! There was also the fact that at that time I couldn't think of musicians that I felt could approach the music from the direction that I wanted to do it in. There was a lot of fusion music happening, for want of a better word, there was a preoccupation with that approach, and I don't think there was room for what we wanted to do. And both Sam and Anthony wanted me to stay involved with their music, and because of that, I felt that was the promise to be fulfilled at that time, that those relationships were the most important to me. There were many projects with Anthony and Barry that we recorded under Anthony's direction, and then there were many projects that we recorded under Sam's direction. To me, that was the follow-up of what we did on Conference of the Birds. So pretty much until 1981, which is when I did start a band, I stayed with that thing.

The other thing was that, as a young man (I guess when we did this album I was 26), I think I lacked a certain confidence, too, to just jump out there and start doing things myself. I felt comfortable in the role of sharing in somebody else's music, and getting back to what we said about the bass and the character of the instrument, at that time I wasn't quite sure how to assume the mantle of leadership. So I was quite comfortable with that decision. I think it's important you do things when you're ready for them, and by the time the first edition of the quintet happened in 1982, I was ready for it, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, I had music written for it - and to me it was more meaningful in that way.

I think it's one of the problems we're facing right now in the record industry, in that the young players sometimes are forced into leadership positions before they've had a chance to really check out all the possibilities. At an early age, you may not be clear about exactly what it is you want to do, so then there's a sort of grasping at an idea or going along with the suggestions of the record company or whatever, and there's not enough time to formulate your music. Of course, there are exceptions. Miles had his first band in his early twenties, I believe. But in a lot of cases, these things take time to develop and to formulate.

I think as a young player, it's important that you get a chance to check out a lot of different things, you know, and to find out from all those things exactly what it is you're interested in. That was my approach, and how I felt about what I was doing. I've never felt that I was on a time schedule. I think the music has to happen in its own time and when you're ready, and I try and let that be the governing factor in what I do.

I was, to be honest, a little unsure of how to integrate the chordal instrument into the music that I was writing. Then I started to find some things in my writing that seemed to really call out for it. For some of the music on Triplicate [ECM], although it was done as a trio with Jack De Johnette and Steve Coleman, I was beginning to hear the possibilities of a chordal instrument. That's when I started getting together with Kevin Eubanks, and we put together that quartet.

Anyway, that quartet with Kevin and Smitty and Steve ended around 1992, just the end of '91. I had been involved in other projects over the last couple of year, and when I put this new group together in January of last year, I really wanted to include a chordal instrument in that. I had been an admirer of Steve Nelson, who is a great player, for some time, and I liked the idea of the vibraphone for the sparseness of its voicings, and Steve interesting way of exploring those ideas. I mean, it's not like you have ten fingers, as you do in the piano. So that was a very big part of what I heard for the sound of this group.

So I think that's sort of the direction that I hear the music. I'm looking for a harmonic context for the music. The other side of it is that I've increasingly involved in how to create closed-form music which still has an open form sound. In other words, I wanted to write structures which would create possibilities that you would not necessarily find in open-form playing, which you wouldn't stumble across, and it would create certain rhythmic disciplines, let's say, within the form, but at the same time have a certain openness.