Dave Holland

Dave Holland :


English bassist-composer-bandleader, moved to the United States in 1968 to play with Miles Davis.

I knew him very slightly. He played on a number of festivals that we were appearing on with Miles’ group and he was in New York at the same time that we all were. The opportunity I had to play with him was a call I got one afternoon to come down to his studio and just have a jam session with John McLaughlin and Buddy Miles. It was very loose and a lot of fun, and that was the extent of it. It’s interesting though—he had this really long cord and he would walk up to cats and give them a little riff to play and then he’d walk up to someone else and give them a little riff to play, and that’s exactly what Miles did, that same kind of intuitive orchestration.

I think I first heard Hendrix on record when his first album came out in 1967. I just thought it was great because of the looseness, that the music was very improvisational; it wasn’t as regimented as a lot of the music that was being listened to in that period. Miles was interested in all of the music going on around him at the time. He liked Sly Stone’s band and Jimi’s a lot. And I heard rumors—I never spoke to Miles directly about it—but I heard rumors that there was some idea that there may be a collaboration. But it was never more than a rumor, as far as I know.

Hendrix was in Woodstock a fair amount in the late ’60s and he had a musical project that he was doing with local musicians from this area—a more freewheeling kind of thing. His music was growing all the time and there was a sense that he was looking to really expand the horizons of what he was doing. He already had, but I think he still had more of a vision of a collective kind of thing. There was something about his playing that had very much to do with groups and collective playing, interactive playing, which of course is part of the jazz tradition. Well, it’s all coming from the same root, which is the blues. That’s where jazz shares common ground with rhythm ’n’ blues and funk and all these different strains that have developed out of the blues. I think that Hendrix was sort of playing off the older blues styles—very loose, the interaction with the voice and the guitar. He had some very strong roots in the Delta blues stuff, which is why he might’ve gotten on with jazz musicians. There’s a common ground there.

Source : http://jazztimes.com/articles/20150-jimi-hendrix-modern-jazz-axis