Dave Holland – Bass

One of the frustrating things about playing the bass when I was a kid, and one of the things that motivated me to do these transcriptions, was the dearth of material available for bass players to try reading with. I remember getting some books; Yes, Genesis and Led Zeppelin but they had been put together by pianists mainly and had not real relationship with the actual performances on recordings. I particularly remember those ridiculous chord diagrams that showed you that the chord was a D but they were invariably first position chords that bore not even the vaguest similarity to the chords that Steve Howe, Steve Hackett or Jimmy Page were using. In short, useless. As I gravitated towards Jazz, the situation didn’t get much better as the only transcriptions of Jazz players around at the time were solos and very small sections of a performance. I wanted to see the whole thing written now but it never was (and, in the main, still isn’t). So, I decided to do it myself.

Go forward 45 years and things are different in that we have the MOISES apps, software like Transcribe! that can slow things down and isolate them. The fact remains, however, that, in order to access a decent transcription of a Jazz performance, you generally have to be self reliant. All of this frustration brought me to this point. I was driving around listening to an MP3 player in the car and this tune popped up. I was listening to it as I was driving thinking whether it was one I could try and I glanced at the player and it said the track is 17:24 long (it say’s 17:18 on the cover but my computer says different). My first thought was ‘that’s too long’ but, then my father’s stubborn streak (my brother’s all have it) appeared and I thought; ‘do it, you f**** lightweight’. It took days!

So here is the title tune from the the 2002 Dave Holland Big Band album, ‘What Goes Around’ – all 16 pages of it. I have tried proof reading it to death but it always hard to get under these long transcriptions and there may be a couple of errors but I THINK I have got them all. There are some challenges in here but the main issue is the alternating 6:4 and 5:4 bars – I am not entirely confident but I think there may be a few bars where the thing is inadvertently turned around and you get some odd things going on but it may be my cloth ears.