Jazz
Dave Holland turned eighty on 1 October, and ECM has marked it with a walk through the catalogue the bassist has left there. He was born in Wolverhampton in 1946, came to London as a teenager and moved to the United States after Miles Davis recruited him.
His first record for the label was as a sideman with Chick Corea in 1971, catalogue number 1009. Two years later came “Conference Of The Birds”, with Sam Rivers, Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul, which ECM still treats as a landmark of its early jazz years. In between there was Gateway, the trio with John Abercrombie and Jack DeJohnette.
The quartets and quintets of the eighties and nineties launched Steve Coleman, Robin Eubanks and Chris Potter. Holland summed up the method with a piece of advice from Sam Rivers: “Don’t leave anything out, use it all.”
On the label, in 2003 he said: “ECM is a rather special label. We met at a stage in our lives when we were both trying to put together some ideas of what we wanted to do.”
The most recent record the label counts for him is the 2025 duo with John Scofield. He has also recorded three times with Anouar Brahem, the last alongside Django Bates and cellist Anja Lechner.
Text by Aina Torrents