Loading details…
about this album
This collaborative album of Pino Palladino and Blake Mills is inspired by funk, West African, and Cuban music. Pino Palladino is possibly the most famous working session bassist. Notes With Attachments is the first album released under Palladino’s own name, co-headlining with producer and instrumentalist Blake Mills. The 34-year-old Mills is also known as a supporting player, producing for artists like Perfume Genius . Notes With Attachments is an elusive instrumental album. The songs are based around repeating chord changes inspired by funk, West African, and Cuban music, but the continuously shifting arrangements mean that no one instrument carries the melody for long. It’s the sound of consummate collaborators imagining a world where there’s no such thing as a lead performer. On “Ekuté,” Palladino’s bass and guitar lines bounce off each other in a syncopated rhythm. As fuzzy, distorted yawns of guitar give way to squealing saxophone and bass clarinet, the players match intensities so that they sound almost like the same instrument at different ends of its range. The song started out as a Fela Kuti-inspired one-chord jam. “We were trying to figure out all the different places that one beat or bassline could take you,” Mills said in a statement. Many songs here seem as if they were already in the air, just waiting to be captured in final form: “Man From Molise” began as a Palladino composition inspired by Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal and recorded with a New York ens
