One of the most extraordinary jazz concerts I’ve ever attended was the unaccompanied duo of Sam Rivers and Dave Holland at D.C. Space on May 23, 1980. It was a small room filled with folding chairs on the second floor above a bar at 7th and E Streets in Washington. Standing at one end, Rivers improvised a phrase on soprano sax; Holland improvised a response on bass, and they launched into the first of two hourlong sets that justified every claim ever made for the concept of “spontaneous composition.”
It was spontaneous not just in the sense of working without notation or themes, but also in the sense of refusing to fall back on practiced licks. In the cramped quarters, the audience could tell that each musician was surprising himself as well as his partner, as each new phrase grew out of the previous one. That linkage of phrase to phrase into handsome architecture, built from frustration and satisfaction, validated the music as true composition—as structured and emotional as any painstakingly assembled score.
“He’d start playing; I’d start playing, and we’d be off,” Holland remembers. “It was all about listening to each other on the bandstand. It was immersing yourself completely in the music, embracing your fellow musicians and being ready to follow the music wherever it led. We could change on a dime. We’d hit a groove or a melody and it would sound like it was written. People would often say that.”
“Traditionally in jazz you play a theme,” Rivers told me in 2005, “and then you improvise on that or on the harmonic material. I decided to take it a little further. You take a theme and then depart from it without regard to the underlying
