Miles Davis recruits Dave Holland... and goes electric
Few musicians can match the pedigree of the English jazz bassist Dave Holland, thanks to his work with Miles Davis, Stan Getz and just about everyone else. Born in 1946 and a star by his mid-twenties, he has performed with such an array of influential musicians – and in so many different bands – that it’s hard to describe his contribution in a few words. Look at the map of jazz history and he’s all over it. Like so many other bass players of his generation, Holland started out as a guitarist before making the switch. “I was a rock’n’rolleducated guitar player who basically played chords,” he told us a while back. “I toured on bass guitar with Roy Orbison around ’66, but I considered myself primarily an acoustic bass player, and I still do.”
After moving to London in 1964 and scoring a regular slot at Ronnie Scott’s, Holland met Miles Davis. “The drummer Philly Joe Jones – who was living in London during that period, and who I knew – came up to me as I was getting on the bandstand and said, ‘Dave, I want to tell you something: Miles wants you to join his band!’ A couple of weeks later I got a call from his agent, asking me if
I could be in New York in two days to start work.”
Once settled in NYC, Holland was given three weeks with Herbie Hancock, Davis’s keyboard player, to learn the set which the band were playing at the time. He didn’t actually meet Miles until the band were on stage together, he recalled: “I got to the club and I was a little bit shy, and was waiting to see what was happening – and the next thing I knew, everyone got on the bandstand and I got up there with them. Nobody told me what we were going to play or anything – Miles just started.”
The previous incumbent on bass in Davis’s band had been the legendary Ron Carter: big boots to fill by anybody’s standards. Still, Holland – despite being barely more than a talented kid – knew better than to attempt to copy Carter’s style. “I was 21 years old,” explained Holland, “so I was still discovering what my own thing was. I had various influences that I built on as a young player, and Ron was one of them – and I was starting to have some of my own ideas about music and what I wanted to do, but I think I’d already realised at that age that you can’t replicate anybody else’s playing. If I had gone in and tried to be another Ron Carter, which I couldn’t have been anyway – I would have failed – I don’t think that’s what Miles was looking for.”
The new band soon hit the ground running, with Chick Corea replacing Hancock and striking up a friendship with Holland. The first recording sessions were for the Filles De Kilimanjaro LP, on which Holland played acoustic bass on two songs. Regarded nowadays as a bridge between Davis’s more traditional acoustic music and the electric fusion which followed, Filles was a triumph for Holland.
For fans of Miles Davis’s electric music, his peak came with two key albums – 1969’s In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew from the following year. Holland played on both of these classic LPs, which helped to advance the cause of jazz-rock fusion into the Seventies, its most popular decade. By this point Holland had switched from acoustic bass to bass guitar, adding a wah pedal for added tonal versatility.
“The music was Miles’s idea, of course,” recalled Holland, “and we’d utilised a very fine electric bass player, Harvey Brooks, on some of the Bitches Brew sessions along with my acoustic bass. Some of the music really started to sound to me like it needed an electric bass in order to provide the tonal setting for the music – with the weight that the electric bass has, and the definition – and so around that period I said, ‘Look, I think it would be great if I played bass guitar on some of these songs’ – and that’s what I did.”