keeping fast

He's keeping fast company, part of a jazz quartet that also includes drummer Billy Higgins, trumpeter Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, who is exploring the outside edge of the stratosphere with his alto sax.

From Time Magazine Archive

"Now I want to buy somethin' pretty for your mother," said Mr. Hilton, as they went soberly away down the street, the children keeping fast hold of his hands.

From The Life of Nancy by Sarah Orne Jewett

From Peter these I hold, of him instructed, that I err163 Rather in opening than in keeping fast, So but the suppliant at my feet implore.'

From Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" A Course of Lectures Delivered Before the Student Body of the New York State College for Teachers, Albany, 1919, 1920 by John T. (John Theodore) Slattery

And, anciently, there existed what is called the Orphic Life, men keeping fast to all things without life, and abstaining wholly from those that had.

From Tablets by Amos Bronson Alcott

If, then, the enemy attacked, the ships, by simply keeping fast the springs and veering the cables, would swing with their broadsides facing east.

From The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence by A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan