Art & Creativity Quote by Dave Holland

Holland is making a quiet, radical pitch: jazz doesn’t need a permission slip. In a genre long shadowed by gatekeeping - chord charts, “changes,” the insinuation that you’re not really hearing it unless you can name it - he re-centers the listener’s body and instincts. The line is a defense of immediacy in music that’s often framed as homework.

The intent is inclusive, but not pandering. Holland isn’t dismissing craft; he’s separating making from receiving. A bassist who has lived inside the architecture of harmony and time is uniquely positioned to argue that the building is meant to be inhabited, not admired from a distance. When he says “allow your feelings,” he’s calling out the clenched, self-conscious way audiences can approach jazz, like they’re being tested. “Carried along” is the operative phrase: swing, pulse, and interplay do the persuading before theory arrives to explain what just happened.

Subtextually, it’s also a rebuttal to the old stereotype of jazz as elitist modernism - music for musicians, brainy and sealed off. Holland’s own career, spanning Miles Davis’s electric bands to adventurous ECM recordings, sits at the crossroads of complexity and atmosphere. He’s seen how even the most harmonically dense playing can communicate if the groove is honest and the dynamics tell a story.

The cultural context matters: as jazz education professionalized, technical literacy became both a ladder and a barrier. Holland keeps the ladder, but he refuses to let it become the door.