Dave Holland – Bass

The 1993 Joe Henderson album, ‘So Near, So Far’ was a tribute to the then recently deceased Miles Davis and it remains one of my most listened to albums (my original copy was on cassette!!). I think know almost every note of every solo by all of them. All of the members of the band had performed with Miles at one point or another, Al Foster on drums, John Scofield on guitar and, of course, the fantastic Dave Holland on bass. The material chosen for the album cleverly avoided the big ‘hits’ and the tunes Henderson chose included a lot of the lesser know but still very beautiful compositions associated with the Man In the Green Shirt. This track is the ‘old’ tune with the title ‘Milestones’ and not the tune of the same name that appeared on the later ‘Milestones’ album. This was a John Lewis tune often erroneously attributed to Miles. The part is a fairly standard walking bass part so the eight notes have a triplet feel. It is always a difficult choice whether to include the little accents in the walking lines as they often make the chart much harder to read but the difficulty with this one is the constantly moving key centres. This is not a theory lesson, however, and playing the lines will give you a great sense of how Holland’s mind works when he is playing these kinds of ‘standard’ Jazz tunes as opposed to his own stuff.