Dave Holland – Bass

From the 2001 Dave Holland Quintet album, ‘Not For Nothin”, this is the complete Holland bass performance of the tune ‘Go Fly A Kite’. There are some struggles in transcribing this one as I hear the tune in 6:8 but some of Holland’s phrasing moves out of that and into 3:4. Now you would think that the difference would be subtle and not particularly important but there are some moments where the beam groups get very confusing when he is swapping between the two. Holland has a profound mastery of time feels and, if you look across the 40+ transcriptions on here, there are many, many tunes that are structured very idiosyncratically with alternating bar lengths and so on. The bar lengths stay consistent throughout this tune but the subtle shift require a lot of attention to detail. Remember, there are different ways of writing this down and you may disagree with the choices I have made. That’s ok. So do I.