Time & Perspective Quote by Dave Holland

Holland is quietly rejecting the museumification of jazz: the idea that the highest compliment you can pay the music is to play it like a well-polished artifact. “Honest and direct” reads like a moral standard, but it’s also a performance standard. He’s talking about tone, time feel, and the courage to choose clarity over cleverness. In a genre that can reward virtuosity for its own sake, “direct” is a jab at baroque self-display. The subtext is: if the audience can’t feel what you mean, your chops are just noise.

“Relevant to today” is where the politics sneak in, even if he doesn’t name them. Holland came up as a young British bassist pulled into the seismic American moment of Miles Davis’s late-60s bands, when jazz was arguing with rock, race, and commerce all at once. That history matters: he learned that the music survives by metabolizing its environment, not by defending its borders. So “of its time” isn’t a branding note; it’s an insistence that improvisation should register the present tense, whether that’s cultural unrest, technological change, or the shifting ways people actually listen.

The quote also carries a gentle warning to institutions that love jazz: reverence can become a kind of slow violence. If the music is treated as heritage first and expression second, it stops being a living language and becomes a recital of correct pronunciations. Holland’s ideal is simpler and harder: play like you mean it, and mean something now.