The poet and novelist, Philip Larkin, was a jazz fan of Luddite inclination who had two pet hates in the music. One was John Coltrane, of whom he wrote in 1967 that "his death leaves in jazz a vast, a blessed silence" - the Telegraph, which ran his jazz column for years, refused to publish it. The other focus for Larkin's eccentric bile was bass solos. He gets a little sympathy there. Locking horns with a bull fiddle can be as cheering as finding your house burgled and your CD collection gone. The instrument's range of tonal colour is relatively limited and a little bass, generally speaking, goes a long way. Unless it's in the hands of a master.
About seven years ago, Dave Holland, one of the greatest bassists ever to grace jazz, gave a solo concert to a packed and rapt John Field Room in the National Concert Hall. It was a mesmeric experience from a master musician, a demonstration of beauty, elegance and feeling that never flagged, full of ideas, every note centred and delivered with a rounded, gorgeously seductive tone.
In fact, that sheer beauty of tone is one of the most immediately arresting things about his playing. It comes with the territory - as another great bassist, Ray Brown, said, it doesn't matter what kind of bass you play, "the sound is in your hands".
"That's absolutely true," says Holland. "I was at a concert when I was about 20 years old. Jimmy Garrison was playing in one group and Ron Carter in another" - both are celebrated jazz bassists - "and I was quite a long way from the stage, at the back of the theatre, so I couldn't see very clear.
"But I found out later that they had both played the same bass that night because one of the basses had been lost in transit. And they sounded so individually different on the same instrument. That's when it dawned on me. The sound is very much to do with the player.
"And I know a bass changes its sound because of the player, too. I've picked up a bass from different players and you can tell a little bit about how they sound and what the interaction is with the instrument. I suppose, physically, it's the way you make the bass vibrate, and each person makes it vibrate differently and therefore the instrument starts to have a characteristic somewhat imbibed by the player."
Holland is so comprehensively identified with everything best about jazz bass that it's a bit of a shock to discover his first instrument was a ukulele - a kind of guitar with a terminal disease, once popularised by singer George Formby in 1940s and 1950s Britain. Though, in retrospect, maybe not; Holland was born in Wolverhampton in 1946, when Formby's career was in full spate.
"My family weren't musicians," he explains. "We had a piano in the front room. It was played usually at social events, like Christmas or birthdays. My mother or my grandmother and, I think, my uncle played a little bit. But I started being interested in music as a result of one of my uncle's hobbies - at one point he bought a ukulele, which was quite a popular thing in, like, 1950.
"He kindly offered to show me how to play a few chords and I took to it very quickly. That was my first thing musically. I took a few piano lessons at seven, not for very long. I sort of treated music as a very intense hobby, you know, and wasn't thinking about being a musician."
He was given a guitar when he was 10 and when he was 13 helped put a band together at a youth club. "Three guitars and drums, and we decided we wanted a bass guitarist and I volunteered to do that. So that's when I started playing bass."
He left school at 15 - there were "some family problems" and, anyway, he wanted to leave. Casting around for a job, he realised he could make a living as a musician, because the little band was playing dances and clubs in the Midlands. He heard Ray Brown around that time, switched to double bass and, at 17, was working professionally with it.
The rest is history; studies at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama and working around London with jazz groups varying in style from early New Orleans to avant garde. By 1966 he was at the leading edge of jazz developments in Britain, playing with such as John Surman, Kenny Wheeler and Chris MacGregor, and being influenced by his great American contemporaries on bass, Charlie Mingus, Scott LaFaro, Gary Peacock and Garrison and Carter.
It was a time of intense and varied musical experience for him. Classical composers, notably Bela Bartok, also influenced his thinking, and he was also a regular performer at Ronnie Scott's club, backing saxophonists different as mainstreamer Coleman Hawkins and the more modern Joe Henderson. And it was there in 1968 that Miles Davis heard him and invited him to join his band.
Was this intimidating? "My heart was beating the first night," he answers. "We had no preparation and I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know anybody except Herbie Hancock, whom I'd gone to see the night before, so it was all new."
Miles, who disliked talking about music, was notorious for giving his musicians little or nothing in the way of instruction.
"Absolutely. I think that Miles felt he wanted the individual people to come up with their own creative ideas and solutions. I think if you have to tell somebody too much about how to play and what to do, then you've probably got the wrong player for the band.
"You want a player that you want to say the minimum to because you want it to be their music as well. So, if their concept and everything is right for the group, then I think nothing much has to be said."
It's a precept he has followed ever since, through a career at the top which has included forming Circle, a musically very open quartet with Chick Corea, Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul after he left Davis in 1970. He has also played with Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk and Sam Rivers, as well as forming Gateway in the mid-1970s with guitarist John Abercrombie and drummer Jack DeJohnette.
In the early 1980s he brought together his own first, full-time working band, a quintet which included questing musicians such as Kenny Wheeler and Steve Coleman. Various trios, quartets and quintets have followed, as have awards and Grammy nominations - last year's Points Of View ECM album was Grammy nominated, while the American jazz bible, down beat, voted him bassist of the year.
The Points Of View album is particularly significant since, with one change - saxophonist Steve Wilson left in mid-1998 and was replaced by another reedman, Chris Potter - it's the band Holland has in Cork this weekend. Two members of the group, trombonist Robin Eubanks and vibes player Steve Nelson, are long-time associates of the bassist, while drummer Billy Kilson has been with the quintet from its formation in the summer of 1997.
With a kind of global musical melting pot going on now, do we not - as the Chinese curse has it - live in interesting times?
"I agree," he answers. "I think to some degree there have always been interesting things going on, because I think one of the things that happened is that the media and the record industry have been focused on particular approaches to the music and found that it was a popular approach to take as far as selling records to the public.
"But I think it's given a little bit unbalanced view of what's still going on in this music. So, there have been a lot of interesting things going on for some time and I think now people are ready again to listen to them and to support them. And I think that's something to celebrate and recognise, rather than to try and define. You know - `this is jazz and this isn't'. Just treat it all as music."
Applying this to his own group, he is careful to avoid labels. "I'd rather talk about the orientation which I have, like the fact that we're all coming from the tradition and creating a sort of contemporary setting for improvised music which draws on traditional things but is projecting some new ideas.
"The music's very rhythmic a lot of the time, and there's also a lot of different kinds of rhythmic structures, but we always try to make it feel accessible in terms of the way the rhythm moves.
"In other words, there's a lot of dance elements, you might say, to it in a sense. Also, melody plays a very important part and the structures can be complex, but we're also trying to present the music in a simple way on a certain level. Something that's very direct.
"And, you know, I like Ellington's examples of, like, being able to present very strong rhythmic and melodic pieces which have a very powerful way of communicating, but within those things are very complex structures, harmonies and rhythms and so on. I like to hear music and art and a lot of other things not to be on an elitist level.
"Jazz is actually a very emotional music and the prime directive is to have fun, to enjoy it."
Amen to that.
Dave Holland's quintet plays at the Everyman, Cork, tomorrow afternoon. Holland can also be heard at the Metropole, Cork, tonight