From the moment he became one of Britain’s most famous jazz exports, by joining Miles Davis in 1968, Dave Holland has continued to build his reputation as one of the finest double-bassists in jazz.
From his burnished tone to his inventive dexterity on this traditionally cumbersome instrument, he has always been in the top rank of players, and for the last ten years he has also led a prize-winning quintet as well.
For his London concert, which was also a celebration of his 60th birthday last month, he was playing a curiously half-sized instrument that was short on resonance and depth, and in some respects his band, too, delivered rather less than the sum of its parts.
Both the trombonist Robin Eubanks and the tenor saxophonist Chris Potter are formidable soloists at their best, but both seemed strangely inhibited on the Barbican stage, with only one of Potter’s solos really catching fire, and Eubanks holding back from his full-on bluster. It was left to the two new members of the band, the drummer Nate Smith and the pianist Jason Moran (deputising for the indisposed vibraphonist Steve Nelson) to shed their inhibitions and match the bravura of Holland’s own playing.
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Moran staked out his intentions on the opening Prime Directive with a storming solo, and made the most of his subsequent cameos, on both acoustic and electric pianos, while Smith produced a flamboyant finale that really connected with the crowd. Overall, maybe held back by Holland’s love of unusual time signatures and unfamiliar structures, the band sounded polite, rather than inspired.
However, the other half of the concert, in which Holland played with his old mentor from 1960s London, the Canadian trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and the venerable American guitarist Jim Hall, was a triumph of gentle chamber jazz, full of passing nuances, and dappled light and shade. In his own bands, Hall nowadays favours oblique abstraction, but he shed this for Holland, playing darting runs and subtle chords, particularly on a wistful ballad portrait of New York that drew out the evening’s finest playing from Wheeler’s melancholy flugelhorn.