The Dave Holland Sextet have struck a balance between cacophony and sparsity in their latest release, Pass It On.

The Dave Holland Sextet have struck a balance between cacophony and sparsity in their latest release, Pass It On. The horns never impede one another; even in the midst of wild exclamation, they never leave the music needlessly unattended – silences are never awkward. The intensity with which they attack the music left me breathless before reaching the fifth track. I had to wait until the following day to finish listening. But there is something missing. They didn't infuse the gravitas found in timeless performances such as Oscar Peterson's Night Train, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, or Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert.  While this is a remarkable musical achievement on the Sextet's part I can't proclaim this creation seminal.

Some may think it unfair to throw such heavyweights at the Dave Holland Sextet, but the reality is the musicians on this album (and anywhere else where Jazz is performed) do not perform in a historical vacuum. In some of their performances, I hear potential greatness and immediately think of the genre's titans, but they have yet to mature as a group.

The group is fronted by Robin Eubanks on trombone, Alex “Sasha” Sipiagin on trumpet and Antonio Hart on alto saxophone. All of whom have played with Dave Holland in previous ensembles. The new members include pianist Mulgrew Miller and drummer Eric Harland.  In Harland's capable sticking the freshest colors emerge. The group plays with confidence, but their exceptionality isn't unique in the scope of Jazz history. It is Harland that pushes beyond the conventional level of professional musicianship and bears his personality in the spatial divide between each strike, or as Winton Marsalis once put it, “it's not the notes that you play, but the space you put between them.”

Pass It On begins with the one composition not composed by Holland.  “The Sum of All Parts,” by Robin Eubanks, insinuates a trombone solo with drum accompaniment, but reveals itself as the inversion. Harland is too interesting to ignore. I don't rest blame on some artistic deficiency inherent to Eubanks – there is none. To a great degree I blame Holland, who produced this album, for pushing Eubanks' trombone hard left in the stereo spectrum.

Another dubious production decision is the constant pull up and push down (volume, that is, or as the audiophiles will insist, level) of the piano. Miller doesn't change his accompaniment to fit in between the other instruments or altogether stop playing, he just gets quieter. Holland and Miller remain constant – as they should – with the bass at the bottom of the aural field and the drums everywhere at once.  The placement of all the instruments in general – continuing with the trumpet center, sax hard right – made me question the viability of mixing Jazz with a sensibility reserved for genres that have grown up with technology and not in spite of it.

With other recordings, primarily those of trios, there is only slight panning to insinuate the instrument's placement on stage. A YouTube video revealed that the Dave Holland Sextet's stage placement is as found on the entire recording, but with such hard panning throughout Pass It On I'm left feeling a little cheated. There are moments in the sixth track, “Modern Times,” where the lead instruments sometimes act as harmonic accompaniment and the panning works to the sound's advantage. However, when a performer moves from the verticality of harmony to the horizontality of melody, I want to feel as though I'm looking the sound in the face despite the stage's geography; that it's coming at me and not flanking me.

The only conclusion regarding this production technique is that this recording was mixed not for headphones. A disappointment for the college-bound enthusiast whose musical life is spent primarily between earbuds.

The most experimental (and longest) composition comes as “Rivers Run,” which is dedicated to Holland's venerated mentor, Sam Rivers. The piece is as fluid and as varied as any great river, yet structurally equanimous through the rapids. It opens with the rhythm section tracing out a great longing, yet without great fanfare. When the sax explodes into wild exclamations – with the bass in tow – the brass hold fast the melodic foundation. The emotion runs wild, but the music feels always controlled: the structure planned, but the freedom to cry out is not infringed.

Once the emotive energy is spent, the river calms to a casual tempo. The music pauses briefly to breathe.  The bass resets the scene. The rhythm drops into a heavy, spacious distemper; hints of the latent turmoil leaping about the drumset. The curious dissonances remain at the head, but a stressless bass harmony follows. Then, about three-quarters into it, Harland settles into a solo that ups the tempo and tension. The head, in all its hypnotic power, is repeated and off goes Hart on a vicious musical current. The river ends with a waterfall, where everything ceases movement at the bottom and the piano and drums are left to ring slowly out their last note/breath.

Though the recording is comprised of material Holland has previously performed on other releases, there remains a freshness that is resilient against the darker streams coursing through the pieces. Dave Holland says, “I want the music to be alive and real. I want to be enthusiastic. By extension, that translates to the audience.” Even if it isn't a work of eternal genius, on Pass It On, Dave Holland lives up to his creed and has left me an enthusiastic disciple of his work.