And So It Begins . . .

With the release of the 2024 Big Ears festival lineup begins the months-long process of revisiting the music of our long-time favorites and heroes, as well as discovering and exploring new artists. My Spotify and YouTube search engines have been getting quite the workout the past 24 hours as I scroll through the various artists listed in the lineup announcement.

I can start anywhere sharing what I've uncovered so far, but out of sheer randomness I'll start with jazz bassist Dave Holland.  He's no stranger to jazz fans and far from an unfamiliar face. If you have a collection of jazz recordings of any size at all, chances are good Dave Holland is in there somewhere.  Way back in the 1960s, he started playing with Miles Davis, replacing the esteemed bassist Ron Carter in the Miles Davis Quintet.  Holland plays on some tracks on the Quartet's last studio recording, Filles de Kilimanjaro, and then essential Miles fusion albums like Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way.  His subsequent discography is massive - far too much to list here - but he notably recorded with leading free-jazz musicians of the 1970s like Sam Rivers and Anthony Braxton.  His album Conference of the Birds included Rivers and Braxton as well as drummer Barry Altschul and is considered a cult favorite in some circles (including here). The man is a bona fide jazz legend, and at 76 he's still going strong with no signs of slowing down. 

His most recent project has been the Dave Holland New Quartet, featuring pianist Kris Davis, sax player Jaleel Shaw, and drummer Nasheet Waits.  They haven't released an album yet as far as I know, and the few videos I've found online of performances at European jazz festivals were of poor sound quality - I didn't repost them here out of deep respect for Holland. But above is an outstanding, professionally recorded set from a 2009 festival in Belgium, with Chris Potter on tenor, Steve Nelson on vibes and marimba, and Nate Smith on the drums.

So as I'm sure you've surmised by now, the Dave Holland New Quartet will be playing Big Ears 2024. That's reason enough for excitement right there, but to make it even more epic, the band will include the Brooklyn-based Pakistani musician Arooj Aftab.  To keep it a quartet, the band will play without a percussionist, which is not unusual for Aftab.

Aftab has played Big Ears the past two years, and while I like her music, I missed her both times. To be fair, with 200 to 300 performances each year, I usually wind up missing 80 to 85% of the acts over the festival weekends. Each year, painful decisions have to be made. Here she is below doing a Tiny Desk (Home) Concert in 2021 with her Vulture Prince Ensemble: Maeve Gilchrist on harp, Gyan Riley on guitar, the great Shahzad Ismaily on bass, and Darian Donovan Thomas on violin (no percussion). 

It's exciting to imagine what a merger of the two bands - the Dave Holland New Quartet and Arooj Aftab's Vulture Prince Ensemble - will sound like. I just hope they don't schedule this set at the same time as some other must-see show like they have with Aftab in the past.