Raised in Indiana, Darling played bass in a rock-and-roll band, alto and baritone saxophone in jazz ensembles, and tuba in his hometown's marching bands, but he discovered his vocation when he first picked up a cello.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Darling joined Paul Winter's first Consort and participated in the legendary sessions for Road and Icaro. He disappeared from the scene for about five years, then returned to the fold and helped the master of world music conceive two more milestones of the genre, Earth Dance and Common Ground. Playing with Winter gave Darling the opportunity to hear music from all over the world: Brazilian music, African folk, Hindu percussion... The Consort was a laboratory in which every solo served as an incubator for a solo career.

And so Darling accompanied Ralph Towner on Old Friends New Friends, Glen Moore on Introducing, and then many others, including even singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie and the group Spyrogyra.

Meanwhile, he launched his solo career with Journal October. The album already displays the traits that would define the mature Darling: superb command of his instrument, a refined taste for classical sonorities, and a preference for moderate tempos and minor keys. The minimalist variations for solo cello on Slow Return and the improvisation for cello and electronics on the title track stand out. The timbral qualities of his instrumental technique, however, are better highlighted in the two Solo Cello pieces: Gypsy lament, Indian mantra, jazz improvisation, and Western melody tend to blur into a tonal dialectic that places emotional intensity before chromatic suggestion.

Contrary to what avant-garde jazz musicians were doing at the time, Darling's solos shun cold stylistic speculation and plunge unreservedly into a cornucopia of exotic accents and Western melodies. The chromatic allure of "songs" such as Minor Blue and Clouds is extremely powerful, even though the architecture of the score is among the most daring of the period (a trio of cellos, one superimposed on the other, each with different rhythmic and melodic roles).

Cycles leveraged Darling's previous experiments and took advantage of a top-notch ensemble, including saxophonist Jan Garbarek, pianist Steve Kuhn and sitar player Collin Walcott. Mainly, Darling's combo coined a form of sophisticated Indian-tinged pop-jazz ballad: the romantic cello lines complement the nocturnal jazzy piano in Cycle Song, almost playing a different song from the one the piano is playing; and the saxophone intone the nostalgic Ode over a delicate tapestry of guitar, cello and sitar. The nine-minute Fly is a collective exploration in which saxophone, piano and cello share the chores of shaping an abstract and slightly anguished atmosphere. Cycle Two - Trio The saxophone steals the show in Cycle One - Namaste and the tabla dominate the eight-minute Cycle Three - Quintet And Coda, which actually one of the most fluent jazz pieces here. The leitmotiv is mostly sentimental, the pace is mostly calm, the tone is mostly profound.

The collaborations continued in large numbers, both in the world of folk (Tom Rush) and in that of jazz: Eos, with guitarist Terje Rypdal. After the hysterical Jimi Hendrix-ian guitar solo of Laser, Darling's elongated cello drones meet Rypdal's atonal moans in the 14-minute Eos, that ends in a calm and elegiac manner like a baroque adagio. The two instruments intone the same charming melody in Bedtime Story, each in its own way: the cello in its elegant and polite classical manner, and the guitar in its loud and distorted rock manner. The nine-minute Mirage falls into the trap of a languid guitar melody worthy of second-rate cocktail-lounge performers. But the cello reaches a peak of pathos only in the arcane free-form expressionistic meditations of Light Years; the rest being too affected by Rypdal's exuberant persona.

Meanwhile, Darling further refined the idea behind Paul Winter's Callings and the Missa Gaia. In a trio with two other veterans of the Consort, guitarist Jim Scott and oboist Nancy Rumbel, Darling also formed Radiance, with whom he performed highly original chamber world music. Compared with Oregon, the inspiration is only slightly more ethnic, but it is the performance that constitutes the salient feature, characterized by a formal purity worthy of the most austere chamber music.

In the second half of the 1980s, Darling resigned himself to a supporting role, first for pianist Michael Jones, on Amber, After The Rain, and Magical Child, and then for flutist Radhika Miller, with whom he recorded Origins, Gems Of Grace, Blossoms In The Snow, and Laughing Waters.

The Tao Of Cello (Tasker, 1989) contains 22 brief improvised interludes for solo cello. The program falls roughly into two categories: the baroque melodic exercise, best represented by Restraint Begins With Giving Up One's Own Ideas, and Eastern chamber music, best represented by Man Follows The Earth. The former reaches the most spectacular level of sophistication and elegance (The Further You Go The Less You Know, He Who Is Filled With Virtue Is Like A Newborn Child, The Valley Spirit Never Dies), while the latter swings between humble meditation and languid elegies with pompous titles (The Tao Of Heaven Is To Take From Those Who Have Too Much And Give To Those Who Have Too Little).

His prestige in the world of new age grew to the point that he was able to return to recording under his own name. Thus came another masterpiece, Cello, an album devoted entirely to the classical movement known as the "adagio." All the compositions are adagios, indeed adagios inspired by the adagio par excellence, Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings. To this must be added a spacey sound produced by electronic arrangements, extending the sound of the cello. The result is a series of tonal poems such as Choral (a variation on Cycle Song) and polyphonic improvisations such as Psalm (a tribute to Hindemith).
The three Dark Wood pieces are inspired by the techniques of Gregorian chant, while Lament and The Bell hark back to the harmony and counterpoint of the Middle Ages. No Place No Where, Two Or Three Things, and In November are practically "remixes" of the same composition (the cello is overdubbed so many times that it creates the impression of a string orchestra). Only Totem returns to the rhapsodic tradition of the classical cello.

After a few years came another triumph of his solo art: Eight String Religion. The album took ten years to complete. Its strength lies first and foremost in its melody, whether the delicate melody of Soft Light, plucked very softly on the cello strings and accompanied by cocktail-lounge piano improvisations, or the pop melody of Remember, hummed without words with the poignant nonchalance of a Leonard Cohen ballad. The summit of this sotto voce lied is perhaps Sweet River: while the violin maintains a Renaissance dance rhythm, the violins intone a Baroque adagio that returns in waves, and the piano continues the discourse begun by the chirping of birds.
The title track, by contrast, opens the religious dimension, as its title suggests. The intensity becomes wrenching, although not a single note ever reveals fervor or despair. The mystical impulse instead emerges from Sojourn, from the soft arpeggios of the keyboards, from the intrepid cello melody imitating the ocean, and from the insistent raga figure on the piano. The most lyrical, tender, and moving album of Darling's career. A slow, cosmic intertwining of chords that seems perpetually to fall into a trance.

Dark Wood (recorded in July 1993) repeats the miracle, with an even surer hand in the overdubbing of his cello. The idea is that of the pieces of the same name on Cello (the album is in fact divided into four Dark Wood pieces, beginning with IV): drawing on the techniques of early music (here not only sacred medieval music, but also secular and Renaissance music) to compose slow movements ("adagio" or similar) of classical composure and austerity.
Dawn and New Morning, cradled in melodic fragments that float through the ether with an almost "Schubertian" melancholy sweetness, once again possess the depth and intensity of religious psalms. Indeed, the depths of the low tonal registers in In Motion tend toward an almost Zen-like concentration, while in Earth one can discern faint echoes of raga. In Journey and Medieval Dance, Darling attempts to convey the sense of a fairy tale, but the result is music with a pulsating movement and elusive direction, possessing a hallucinatory quality. Many pieces are barely sketched: Darling brushes the strings of his instrument for a few seconds and then allows the reverberations of the music to fade into the void without even attempting to explain his gesture.
With the humble cello, Darling has found a way to compose music that is increasingly personal and increasingly stifled in its emotionality. Each piece becomes a mosaic of anemic "drones," tunings that imitate the viol, and muffled timbres.
His art of cello doppelgängers resonating from hidden corners of the soul has reached a level of purity truly worthy of ancient sacred music.

In love with classical beauty, Darling is intent on continuing the tradition of the classical cello. Even in his most daring ethno-jazz experiments, he was never a sound technician; he never explored a culture in depth, but merely borrowed its emotionality, timbre, and feeling. Everything his music incorporates is imitated in a highly personal way.

Darling has been and remains one of the leading figures in the revolution that is bringing string instruments to the center of attention in new age music. And although Darling disavows virtuosity for its own sake, his improvisations represent equally important milestones in the evolution of instrumental technique.

After a serious illness, Musical Massage: Balance (Relaxation, 1999) was released, containing four long pieces, all between 17 and 19 minutes: Dream Pearls of Kathak, Irish Miles, Lady Child's Dream, and Bach's Persia.

Radiance consists of David Darling on cello, Jim Scott on guitar, and Nancy Rumbel on oboe, all veterans of Paul Winter's Consort. The trio is one of the first jazz-inflected world-music groups and made history through its performance style, characterized by a formal purity worthy of the most austere chamber music.

Musical Massage: Balance (Relaxation, 1999) contains four lengthy suites.

The River (ECM, 1997), a collaboration with jazz pianist Ketil Bjornstad, is a 12-movement suite for piano, violin, percussion and voice. This brings back the best of Darling, but the tone is a bit too relaxed and languid.

The Sea (1995) and The Sea II (1998)

Epigraphs (ECM, 2000) is mainly an album of Ketil Bjornstad compositions.

Cello Blue (Hearts of Space, 2001) is the ideal follow-up to Eight String Religion (Hearts Of Space, 1993). While it doesn't attain the spectacular intensity of that masterpiece, it continues Darling's poetic and baroque exploration of ambient classical music. It contains the eight-minute Children, the eight-minute Cello Blue, the seven-minute Morning, and the closing Prayer.

b>The Darling Conversations (2007) is a triple-disc set with pianist, composer and electronic musician Julie Weber. The Return Of Desire: Improvisations (may 2008) is a collaboration with pianist Eve Kodiak. Prayer For Compassion (Wind Over The Earth, 2009) was the work of ten years with pianist Mickey Houlihan.

JD Parran, Mark Deutsch (bazantar and sitar), and David Darling collaborated on the live Omegathorp: Living City (september 2002).

Darling died in 2021.