The Dave Holland New Quartet at Smoke Jazz Club

The Dave Holland New Quartet
Smoke Jazz & Supper Club
New York, NY
September 6, 2024

The Friday late set at Smoke Jazz & Supper Club by the Dave Holland New Quartet began and ended with selections that strutted the bassist's strongest compositional suit—originals with a twirling head (as in a melodic theme) interspersed with solos that dance between harmonic calm and "out" exploration. If the middle of the set was less compelling—with its shift into loping funk and blues—even an uneven program by a band this adventurous and capable, in a cozy club, was a fine night out.

The show hit its peak out of the gate with "Homecoming," a composition Holland has revived in multiple bands since it appeared on his 1985 album for ECM Records, Seeds of Time. As on that recording, the piece's jaunty, joyous theme recurred between solos that often offered harmonic contrasts to the brightness of the head.

Holland began the soloing, with a fleet excursion that was followed by one from altoist Jaleel Shaw. Shaw began in slow and dark harmonic territory before accelerating to spiraling, high-register figures that toyed with abstraction. Holland followed with a longer solo that demonstrated his gorgeously rich tone.

The architecture of the solos revealed Holland's subtle skills as a small-group arranger. The head was reprised, often in variations, with each excursion eventually escalating to an engaging musical conversation between the soloist and the band's assertive yet empathetic drummer Nasheet Waits. The excursions could appear to be freewheeling if you weren't paying attention to their underlying structure.

Throughout the set, pianist Kris Davis was the quintessential team player, almost to the point of obscuring her prodigious gifts. Like Holland, she is a band leader whose projects often tread the line between structure and freedom, while rarely venturing to extremes in either. Davis's solo on "Homecoming" ascended from short clusters to rolling arpeggios and then back down again.

After her outing came more clever arranging. Holland played alone, for a short palate-clearing solo before Davis, unaccompanied, restated the theme—which she hadn't done during her solo—followed by the entire band doing so.

Through his 50-plus-year career, Holland has worked in a dazzling range of jazz genres and contexts. Unsurprisingly, parts of his Smoke set evoked past projects. Shaw and Holland formed the tightest connection within the quartet, and their enmeshed playing, powered by Holland's distinctive rhythmic and harmonic stamp, sometimes recalled his riveting '70s and '80s bass/saxophone duo performances with Sam Rivers.

For part of the set's middle, Davis switched from acoustic piano to a Fender Rhodes electric instrument. The shift in sound—and in rhythm, towards 2/4 emphasis—sometimes conjured up the less frenetic moments of the '70s Miles Davis recordings on which a young Holland appeared, along with a similarly youthful Keith Jarrett on Fender Rhodes. At times, a listener could even half expect the arrival of Davis's piercing trumpet over the groove.

Maybe it was the late hour, but the looser feel of the two mid-set pieces, and their less compelling themes and structure, made them occasionally verge on the vapid. Extended vamps were punctuated by solos that were less diverting and innovative, than those of the set's opener and closer.

Tautness returned in full force for the set's closer, "Interception," which reaches back to Holland's classic 1972 solo debut on ECM, Conference of the Birds. Again, a catchy head —this one twistier, more in the style of Ornette Coleman—alternated with solos that expertly traveled both "in" and "out" and returned liberally to the head. Even Waits got with the plan, brilliantly sustaining the rhythmic blueprint of the theme through four-plus unaccompanied minutes in which he played little more than the tom-toms—and never lost his musical through-line.