Everything Matters: A Radically Subjective Review
The Dave Holland New Quartet at the New Mexico Jazz Festival
I’ve long chafed at critical objectivity or the reviewer’s pretense that nothing matters outside of art itself.
Critical objectivity can have good intentions, like the aim for a pure evaluation method with universal relevance. Too often, though, objectivity’s certainty feels like a defensive posture to me. Or an illusion, at least.
Objective criticism can be alienating because it doesn’t reflect why most of us listen to music, for example. Escape. Passion. Some of us might even admit we’re after ecstasy or transcendence at concerts.
We need subjective criticism more than ever. Subjectivity asserts the value of the provisional, situational, personal—and it makes peace with doubt. These qualities can help to make music like jazz more interesting to the uninitiated.
So why not acknowledge that I bring a kind of terroir of being to live improvisation, with my experience seasoned by not only the setting but everything I’ve seen, heard, tasted, felt, and loved that day and, indeed, over my lifetime?
Why not write truer to my experience, which is that everything matters to music?
Everything Matters: A Radically Subjective Review of the Dave Holland New Quartet at the New Mexico Jazz Festival
“I’m staying home this weekend,” my 12yo son announced on a car ride from school last week.
“Okay, no Santa Fe for you this time,” I said.
My son’s friend spoke up from the backseat. “New Mexico? It’s fun down there. Can I go instead?”
This was the nudge the 12yo needed to make the trip to the New Mexico Jazz Festival with me this past weekend. My bassist husband Marc was busy gigging, as usual.
On the 4 1/2 hour drive from Colorado Springs to Santa Fe, we listened to The God of the Woods on audiobook. One of the summer’s bigger books, it’s a mystery about the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl at an Adirondacks summer camp in 1975. A relatable story for my kid, and I appreciated the novel’s sophisticated treatment of class relations and individuality. But the truth is, I often curate reading as a prelude to live music, especially when the performing group is as finely tuned as the Dave Holland New Quartet. More than anything, I chose The God of the Woods for its multiple narrators and slow suspense—they’d prime us, I hoped, for the night’s unfolding of collective improv onstage.
We arrived in Santa Fe in time for lunch at The Shed, specifically for its red chile enchiladas.
No tomatoes dilute this holy red sauce. All zesty chile, freshly roasted. Its flavor profile is so deep that you can never quite taste your way to the end of it. You don’t consume it so much as you let it make you part of something larger than yourself. The best live music works similarly for me.
Here’s a decent recipe from a sacred spot to buy red chile powder, El Potrero Trading Post (online sales, too). New Mexicans and others with strong opinions are welcome to share any red chile secrets in the comments below. No mashed potato, please.
We all have our private associations with performing artists. As we left the restaurant and drove through Santa Fe’s foothills to our cabin, I considered mine. Any time I hear Dave Holland live, I carry a sense of a rainy day in spring 2015 when we filmed his interview for the Wayne Shorter documentary Zero Gravity, as I discussed in this post. Our film crew had spent the morning interviewing Sonny Rollins at his home. We arrived at Dave’s place tired, wet, and cold to find him waiting with homemade potato leek soup, his late wife Claire’s recipe, and some freshly baked bread.
"Nobody can follow Sonny Rollins," Dave quipped. "The best I could do was feed you."
Hearing Dave Holland live also conjures a summer weekend in 2004 when the supergroup of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Dave, and Brian Blade played upstate in New York. I rented a car and road-tripped from Brooklyn with a motley crew of singer Gretchen Parlato, her Monk Institute mate Nick Vayenas (Michel Buble’s trombonist), and Verve Records’ Garrett Shelton. Dave wasn’t using his condo lodging near the performance that night and invited the four of us to stay there after the show. The girls took the king bed upstairs, the boys a pull-out downstairs, and before bed, we all watched The Dave Chappelle Show together. The next morning, we visited Wayne in his condo; Herbie popped over to see what we were laughing about.
This is all to say that my emotional associations with Dave Holland and his music involve nourishing generosity, warm accommodation, and easygoing joy. Not dissimilar to the feelings I get from being in Northern New Mexico.
My son and I checked into our cabin in the Sangre de Cristo mountain forest, about 20 minutes outside Santa Fe. As advertised, this land is enchanted for me, a place of serenity and subtle beauty. Its natural light is the stuff of poetry and paintings. (My kid couldn’t feel his way into this landscape, by the way. He found our cabin crude and the remote forest setting isolating. Oh well.)
Out there in the mountains, I realized that my Dave Holland associations go even deeper. A bassist’s ego can strain against the instrument’s unassuming character. Not Dave’s. His personality seems naturally attuned to the instrument—and/or his personality adapted to the bass over time. In this respect, Dave reminds me of my bassist husband. They both can play bass as a strong lead instrument. But they both have humble confidence from their formative years of stoking the musical fire while the crowd noticed other blazing instruments out front. So Dave’s music hits especially close to home.
Evening showtime meant driving back to Santa Fe and the Lensic, a carefully restored 1930s Spanish-Moorish theater.
The place elevated my mood, as usual. Its rococo ornamentation lends any event a special sense of occasion. This 18th edition of the New Mexico Jazz Festival features many concerts at the Lensic, though never more than one a night. The fest’s 25 shows over 25 days don’t cater to tourists or visitors so much as locals.
While I gathered our tickets at the box office, my son fielded strangers’ questions about his musical interests—as the youngest person at the show by several decades, he was a curiosity. I stopped at the bar for a Negroni, and the bartender mixed one big enough to last through the concert’s two hours.
New Mexico Jazz Festival Director Tom Guralnick (brother of esteemed music writer Peter) appeared onstage to introduce Dave’s group. I was flooded with memories of a fun backstage hang when Tom presented the Wayne Shorter Quartet in Albuquerque in 2002. Cab Calloway’s daughter Chris, among others, livened the scene. That night, Wayne pointed at Tom and said, “You are a warrior.”
Dave echoed Wayne’s sentiments when his quartet took the stage in Santa Fe. Dave said he’d known Tom Guralnick since 1978 and that if Tom was one of many people drawn to the music by passion, he was one of the few who could put his passion into action. When everything matters to a live music experience, the presenter deserves a big huzzah. No Dave Holland New Quartet show without Tom.
The Dave Holland New Quartet was formed in the summer of 2023 and has toured the U.S. and Europe extensively. Last weekend in Santa Fe, they’d just finished a five-night run at New York’s Smoke club, two sets a night. Concert preview master Jim Macnie wrote this announcement for that Smoke engagement:
Caught them at Big Ears last spring and walked away thinking they’re an outfit that lets the action unfold with the patience of a chess master (as well as boasting a chess master’s strategy insights). To a degree, that’s an ongoing Holland MO – the natural flow of his ensemble work has often made way for numerous shifts that enhance a group persona. In Knoxville those shifts were fascinating. The bassist duetting with saxophonist Jaleel Shaw; pianist Kris Davis sharing her deep ingenuity during solo passages; drummer Nasheet Waits powering trio tempests with bass and horn in supplicant roles; and of course, the leader and his sumptuous tone, extrapolating on a motif until his four strings begin to feel like a full ensemble. Throughout, moments of frenzy were balanced by soulful grooves. And from Shaw’s “Flipside” to Davis’ “Little Footsteps” to Holland’s “Rivers Run,” this a band that digs melody.
We heard all this and more in Santa Fe. As Dave Holland took the stage, like most jazz fans at the Lensic, I was thinking of his previous groups, wondering what in his 50-year history might turn up in that night’s music. We were lucky. Everyone in the Dave Holland New Quartet is not only a bandleader and composer in their own right but intimately familiar with Dave’s musical history, able to summon the spirit of an earlier group while retaining their own artistic identities.
Jaleel Shaw’s alto sax playing revealed some deep conversance with Dave and Sam Rivers’ duets in the ‘70s. Jaleel’s absorbed his Wayne Shorter, too—his swerving phrases seemed in no hurry to get anywhere in particular but ended up going nearly everywhere. Kris Davis was two completely different musicians on the grand piano and Fender Rhodes, each equally masterful—her Rhodes playing could evoke Keith Jarrett in the Miles group of which Dave was a member. This conjuring of earlier groups went beyond Dave’s history: The quartet had a jubilant Coltrane moment, with the four musicians assuming the roles of Trane, McCoy, Jimmy, and Elvin.
Nasheet Waits’ drumming throughout the evening put him in my pantheon with Jack DeJohnette and Brian Blade.
“Can you imagine when Nasheet’s talent was being discovered?” I whispered to my son. “How did it feel for him to first get to know rhythm?”
“Oh, that guy started drumming on his crib with his baby fingers,” the 12yo answered. He hung on every note of the concert until he fell asleep for its final half hour.
The musicians’ approach was exploratory, though with a set list and general map. I’ve rarely heard Dave’s basslines so well-integrated with other band members’ solo expressions. Still, the musicians were there to surprise each other. The show’s guiding principles were invention, finding possibility in instability, and letting the spirit or moment define the music.
The Dave Holland New Quartet at the Big Ears Festival in March 2024. Full concert audio. I sure hope this recording was authorized?
My concentration on this lithe, dynamic band began to alter my sense of space and time. When Dave played a motif that grew from a few notes into a broader, labyrinthine loop, I had a vision of entering his home, where a low-ceilinged, book-lined room gives way to a newer, taller addition with river views. Before the concert was over, I found myself thinking that I needed to live better so I could be incarnated as this quartet’s kind of musician next time around. Yes, my musical rapture went that far.
I wasn’t the only one who heard such brilliance at the show. Santa Fe guitarist James Emery posted this on Facebook: “Deepest thanks to Dave and the musicians for performing one of the finest nights of music I have ever experienced. The group interplay and listening was astonishing. They transcended.” The Lensic crowd felt unusually attentive and responsive. Many exclaimed during solos. Several in the crowd sat upright with eyes closed, in postures of deep meditation for the entire show.
So why isn’t the Dave Holland New Quartet attracting wild enthusiasm from fans and critics? The group’s garnered more moderate praise. The 2023 Downbeat Readers’ Poll named the Dave Holland New Quartet the year’s 15th-best jazz group. The quartet didn’t rate at all in the 2024 Downbeat Critics’ Poll.
Is the problem diminished jazz coverage from the New York Times and NPR, those authoritative venues that once helped to establish critical merit and happeningness?
Is the quartet in new form after the intensity of its Smoke club run, and we were the first to hear it in New Mexico?
Was I primed by my positive associations with Dave and by my love of New Mexico’s serene, high-vibe setting to hear more that night? Was the quartet inspired by New Mexico’s serene, high-vibe setting to play more that night?
Will the group’s profile rise when they put an album out? Probably, yes.
Some direct questions to the quartet would bring other perspective, of course. Still, I’d never absolutely define the group’s transporting excellence at the Lensic. I don’t want to be impartial or unbiased. For this concert, I was a music lover with a distinct background and definite predilections who was grateful to be ravished by a night of live jazz.
Who knows? Maybe stars fell on Santa Fe that night, and the Dave Holland New Quartet happened to catch them in its music.
I was there for it.
I was all there.
Nice review.
"[H]is swerving phrases seemed in no hurry to get anywhere in particular but ended up going nearly everywhere." So well put I can almost hear the playing. I also love the idea of identifying the "guiding principles" of a show.