1998 · Album
Thimar
Recorded March 1997 · ECM · Produced by Not specified in provided Wikipedia facts
Dave Holland's Bass Line Holds the Bridge
Three musicians meeting for three days to fuse jazz and Arab traditions without cliché or compromise.
You come to Thimar (1998) for Anouar Brahem's oud, but you stay because of Dave Holland's bass. Holland doesn't announce himself—he enters quietly, listening first, anchoring second. What makes this trio work is that Holland understands he's in a conversation that predates jazz by centuries. He doesn't swing in the bebop sense or walk in the conventional way. Instead, he finds the weight and breathing space that Arab classical music demands, then brings it into dialogue with John Surman's reeds. This is harder than it sounds. A less attentive bassist would either impose jazz time or disappear entirely. Holland does neither.
Recorded over three days in March 1997, the album superbly fuses jazz tradition with Arab classical music, as AllMusic reviewer Raymond McKinney noted, pushing the parameters of both while avoiding the clichés that trap so many cross-cultural experiments. That fusion lives or dies in the rhythm section. Holland's lines don't fight the oud's modal language—they support it, reframe it, make space for Surman's reedy voice to float above without drowning. On tracks where the tempo loosens or the harmonic ground shifts, Holland's presence becomes the invisible architecture holding everything upright.
If you know Holland from his work in other settings, you'll hear something different here. He's not the dominant voice he is in his own bands or his collaborations elsewhere. But that restraint—that willingness to serve the music rather than announce his virtuosity—may be exactly why Thimar works so completely. It's a lesson in listening that goes beyond jazz.
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