David Holland was born October 1, 1946, in Wolverhampton, England. He started on ukulele at four, moved to guitar at ten, and picked up bass guitar at thirteen, largely self-taught from pop songbooks and the radio while playing in local dance bands. As a teenager he took up the double bass under the influence of American bassists Leroy Vinnegar and Ray Brown, learning by playing along with records, and one of his first professional engagements was touring in a big band backing singer Johnnie Ray. He studied with James Merrett, principal bassist of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, who recommended him for the degree program at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where Holland worked across orchestral repertoire, New Orleans jazz, and bebop. From 1966 he was playing regularly with trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, saxophonist John Surman, and pianist John Taylor, and he cited Charles Mingus, Scott LaFaro, Jimmy Garrison, and Gary Peacock as key influences from this period, alongside an interest in the music of Béla Bartók. Established on the London club scene, he backed visiting American musicians including Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, and Joe Henderson.

In July 1968, Miles Davis heard Holland performing at Ronnie Scott's Club in London and asked him to join his group. Holland relocated to New York within weeks and, still in his early twenties, appeared on several of Davis's pivotal transitional recordings, including Filles de Kilimanjaro, In a Silent Way, and Bitches Brew, playing acoustic bass through the sessions that pushed Davis's music toward fusion. In 1970 he left Davis's band and, with pianist Chick Corea, reedman Anthony Braxton, and drummer Barry Altschul, co-founded the collective quartet Circle, whose free-jazz-oriented recordings (including the double LP Paris Concert, cut for ECM in 1971) represent one of the era's most fully realized meetings of structured composition and open improvisation; Circle disbanded in 1972 as Corea moved toward Return to Forever. In the same stretch Holland worked with Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk, and, beginning a collaboration that would run for years, saxophonist Sam Rivers, recording and touring extensively as part of Rivers's working trios and in duo settings documented on releases including 1976's Dave Holland / Sam Rivers for the Improvising Artists label.

Holland's solo career as a leader began under producer Manfred Eicher at ECM with Conference of the Birds (1972, released 1973), a quartet date with Rivers, Braxton, and Altschul now widely regarded as one of the label's foundational recordings and a landmark of 1970s acoustic jazz composition. In 1975 he formed the collaborative trio Gateway with guitarist John Abercrombie and drummer Jack DeJohnette, a group that reconvened on record and in performance intermittently for the next quarter-century. He continued to document his own writing on solo outings for unaccompanied bass (Emerald Tears, 1978) and cello (Life Cycle, 1983), and in the early 1980s he organized his first regular quintet, with Kenny Wheeler, trombonist Julian Priester, alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, and drummer Steve Ellington, a working band whose personnel evolved across the decade (Marvin "Smitty" Smith and Robin Eubanks entered later) through the ECM albums Jumpin' In (1984), Seeds of Time (1985), The Razor's Edge (1987), Triplicate (1988, a trio with Coleman and DeJohnette), and Extensions (1990). Through the 1980s Holland also taught, directing the summer jazz workshop at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, from 1983 to 1990, and serving on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music from 1987 to 1990.

The 1990s brought further work alongside DeJohnette, Gateway, and Herbie Hancock, plus sideman dates with Joe Lovano, Gary Burton, and Jim Hall. Holland's late-decade quartet, with Eubanks, vibraphonist Steve Nelson, and a young Chris Potter on saxophones, expanded into a quintet with the addition of drummer Billy Kilson and issued Dream of the Elders (1996) and Points of View (1998) before Prime Directive (1999) won wide critical acclaim and a Grammy nomination. The same working quintet, one of the most stable and admired small groups in 2000s jazz, went on to record Not for Nothin' (2001) and Extended Play: Live at Birdland (2003), both for ECM. Holland simultaneously assembled a big band from many of the same New York players, winning the Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album with What Goes Around (2002) and earning a further nomination for Overtime (2005), the latter issued on Dare2, the independent label he founded that year in association with Sunnyside Records. Later ensembles under his own name included a sextet (Pass It On, 2008), an octet (Pathways, 2010, another Grammy nominee), and a fusion-leaning quartet with guitarist Kevin Eubanks, pianist Craig Taborn, and drummer Eric Harland (Prism, 2013).

Into his seventies Holland kept moving between formats: a long-running duo partnership with pianist Kenny Barron, documented on The Art of Conversation (2014) and, expanded into a trio with drummer Johnathan Blake, Without Deception (2020); the band Aziza with Potter, guitarist Lionel Loueke, and Harland (2016); Uncharted Territories (2018), a freely improvising quartet with saxophonist Evan Parker, Taborn, and percussionist Ches Smith; the Crosscurrents Trio with Potter and tabla player Zakir Hussain (Good Hope, 2019); and Another Land (2021), a trio with Kevin Eubanks and drummer Obed Calvaire. In 2022 he recorded as a sideman on In Common III with guitarist Matthew Stevens and saxophonist Walter Smith III, and in 2025 ECM released Memories of Home, a studio duo album with guitarist John Scofield drawn from material the two had performed live at SFJAZZ in 2022. Holland was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2017 and holds honorary doctorates from several institutions; as of this writing he continues to perform, record, and teach.

Holland belongs to the generation of bassists, alongside Eddie Gómez, Miroslav Vitous, and Barry Guy, who extended the melodic and harmonic vocabulary Scott LaFaro and Gary Peacock had opened up for the acoustic bass, and he is equally at home holding down dense post-bop harmony, driving open free improvisation, or, on the Miles Davis fusion recordings, anchoring electric grooves. His compositions favor asymmetrical meters, contrapuntal ensemble writing, and a close balance between notated structure and improvisational freedom, qualities audible from Conference of the Birds through the celebrated 1998-2006 quintet and big band. As a bandleader he built and sustained some of the most consistently praised working groups in modern jazz, and his quintet with Chris Potter, Robin Eubanks, Steve Nelson, and Billy Kilson was repeatedly cited in critics' and readers' polls as the best small band in jazz during its run. He has also been a significant educator, through faculty positions at the New England Conservatory and the Banff Centre and decades of mentorship of younger musicians who passed through his ensembles, including Potter and Steve Coleman.