Admirers of the jazz bassist, bandleader, and composer Dave Holland have grown accustomed to being pleasantly surprised by this restless artist’s creative path, which has led from seminal proto-fusion forays with Miles Davis to heady avant-garde jazz with collaborators like Chick Corea, Anthony Braxton, and Sam Rivers, and onward to a long string of successful projects under his own leadership. Still, even the most diligent Holland follower might have been surprised by an announcement that came in February: a new studio project featuring Evan Parker, among the most eminent figures in the mercurial scene commonly referred to as European free improvisation.

But Holland, too, had been present for the beginning of that musical movement during the 1960s, and in 1968 had played alongside Parker on one of the genre’s foundational documents: Karyobin, an album by the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, founded by the percussionist John Stevens. Holland and Parker remained close ever since, and the bassist sat in recently with Parker’s trio at London’s Vortex Jazz Club. In January, the pair released a brief improvisation through Bandcamp as a benefit for that volunteer-run venue, and in March they played an evening of duets there to raise additional funds for a new curatorial initiative.

Further cementing the rekindled collaboration, on May 11 Holland will issue Uncharted Territories, a two-disc (or three-LP) studio recording of improvisations and compositions recorded with Parker, pianist Craig Taborn, and percussionist Ches Smith, on Dare2, the independent label Holland founded in 2005. (National Sawdust Log first reported details about the impending release in February, here.) Four tracks from the album are available already on Spotify and other streaming services: three open-form improvisations, as Holland prefers to call them, and a boldly cubist reimagining of “Q&A,” a Holland piece originally featured on his landmark album Conference of the Birds, issued by ECM in 1973. All of the tracks attest to the formidable chemistry these musicians developed in two busy days of studio work.

But there’s no need to take our word for it: Listen to “Q&A” right now, right here. Then dig into an extensive interview with Holland, conducted by telephone, in which he talks about his pathway into free improvisation, and what brought him back for another round.

NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: Uncharted Territories is a beautiful album, and a genuinely unexpected one, as well. It brought back to mind your participation in one of the most famous and significant albums of British free improvisation, Karyobin by the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, on which you played not just with Evan Parker, but also with Kenny Wheeler, Derek Bailey, and John Stevens. I wondered if I might start by asking you how you first came into contact with John Stevens and that scene?

DAVE HOLLAND: I was living in London from ’64 to ’68, and one of the main centers of activity for the young musicians was Ronnie Scott’s Old Place. A lot of stuff was going on there. And not far from there was this place called the Little Theatre Club, which was literally that: it was a small place, maybe 25 seats, and they would have evening performances of theater productions. And then after that was done, John Stevens and the other musicians would play there from something like 11:00 at night.

I don’t remember exactly what got me there… I know that Barry Guy, who was also involved in that, was a student along with me – he came in maybe two years behind me at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. So it could possibly have been Barry that told me about it. Kenny Wheeler also had started going there. It was one of the centers of improvised music, and I got very interested in it, because it was a very unique kind of approach to improvisation. As a young musician… well, I’m still that way anyway, but I was just interested in lots of approaches to improvisation. There were lots of different areas: the Chris McGregor Band was in London, the South African group, and they had a particular way they approached it, and there was John Surman’s music, and all kinds of different folks. And, of course, there’s the regular Ronnie Scott’s club, where I would play with some of the visiting American jazz musicians.

So there were lots of things going on, but this was an island of activity which I got interested in, and I thought, I want to try and see what I can learn from playing in this context. John was kind of the ringleader, and the guy that this was focused around; Trevor Watts was there, Derek Bailey, and Evan Parker. And so Evan and I, possibly that was where we met. We began a friendship at that point, and I used to go and visit him at his apartment and we’d play in the afternoon. He was one of the musicians in London that I was really connected to strongly in developing improvisation.

I left all that behind, of course, when I went to America, but with me came a record, a copy of Karyobin, that we had made just before I left. It was a record I always was proud to be a part of, and thought it really captured a moment in the development of that music in England. And from that point on, Evan and I remained good friends, and whenever I visited London I would usually check to see if he was around. We had a tradition of going to a pub in the Covent Garden area, which used to be the Anarchist meeting place – it’s called the Lamb & Flag, and we’d always go and have a pub lunch there, a pint of beer and a pub lunch, and catch up on whatever was going on in our lives. And that continued on and on, up to today. We did a few recordings together, we played together on a few occasions after I’d moved to America, and just stayed in touch.

I’d always had at the back of my mind that I’d like to revisit that at some point. I’ve been visiting London more recently, just as part of a sort of thing that I think is happening in this period of my life, of just reconnecting with some things there. I’d been to see Evan play a few times, and I was always fascinated in his development, because he created such a unique language, I would say, for himself, and I was always interested to see where he would go with it, where it would develop. In recent years, he’s put himself into lots of different situations with different contexts, and I think I’ve heard all kinds of things added to the language that he’s been playing. So I went to see him play a few times about a year and a half ago, and then I sat in with him at the Vortex Jazz Club in London. And before I did that, I’d talked to him about doing a duo record.

Now, along with that, I’ve been wanting to do something else with Craig Taborn, and I’ve also wanted to do something with Ches Smith. So it was a kind of a convergence of energy that I was feeling in the music that I was being drawn to. I’d been going to see Ches play in a few situations, and we’d never played, but I thought, that’s somebody I would like to make some music with. With Craig, of course, we did some things in the past, and I was thinking at the back of my mind: I’d like to do something with more open-form improvisation with Craig. So all these thoughts kind of came together about a year ago, and we scheduled this recording for May of last year.