Though just over half-an-hour in duration,
Notes with Attachments, a curiously compelling set of instrumentals by bass ace
Pino Palladino and producer, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist
Blake Mills, took more than two-and-a-half years to complete. Since 1980
Palladino has been prolific as a session and touring musician. He's amassed hundreds of credits with
the Who,
D'Angelo,
Adele,
John Mayer,
Jose James,
Margo Price, and
Keith Urban, to mention only a handful.
Mills is no slouch himself. In 2020 alone, he played on records by
Bob Dylan,
Stephen Malkmus,
Rufus Wainwright, and
Ted Poor. He also produced
Perfume Genius'
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately (that
Palladino also played on) and issued the album
Mutable Set under his own name.
Notes with Attachments began life as
Palladino's first solo album. He'd send
Mills tracks based on ideas he'd was working on, hoping to involve him.
Mills responded and
Palladino sent more. Before long,
Mills was adding production and instrumental touches to these mixes. It occurred to both men that a full collaboration made sense. They enlisted a small cast of friends including drummer
Chris Dave, keyboardist
Larry Goldings, saxophonists
Sam Gendel,
Marcus Strickland, and
Jacques Schwartz-Bart, and violist/violinist
Rob Moose.
The first music
Mills received from the bassist was the core of "Ekute," a one-chord Afrobeat-inspired experiment on bass and guitars with
Dave. Before
Mills got it,
Strickland had layered in multi-tracked clarinets.
Mills was knocked out by a piece that only had one chord but could travel in so many directions simultaneously. To that bounty he added fuzz, a "rubberized" guitar, and a Malian ngoni. The finished tune's hypnotic groove is a set highlight. Opener "Just Wrong" is a breezy little jam that grows right out of its frame.
Mills plays sitar, nylon-string acoustic, and a Brazilian berimbau. These all create a bottom floor for
Dave's syncopated kit drums as
Moose's ethereal strings and
Palladino's semi-acoustic bassline frame
Gendel's wafting Poly Sax in a futurist take on bossa nova. "Djurkel" is titled after a one-stringed African instrument whose sound
Palladino was trying to emulate. Its feel is certainly at the tune's core, but additional layers of steel-bodied National Reso-Phonic guitar, calabash, moaning saxophones, kit drums, percussion, prepared piano, and strings transform it into something exotically other. Both "Chris Dave" and "Man from Molise" are of a piece. They meld a variety of rhythm tracks that anchor wonky tonal and harmonic experiments on stringed instruments, keys, and reeds. Combined, they offer a musical a terrain
Frank Zappa and bassist/composer
Mick Karn could have shared. On "Off the Cuff,"
Palladino and
Mills both play bass;
Dave drives a skeletal double-time beat with crunchy-sounding amplified brushes, and
Gendel's sampled Poly Sax improvises with an inverted sense of lyric harmony.
Notes with Attachments is a strange record, but it is also welcoming thanks to an unhurried pace, colorful yet economical production, and restrained dynamics, all carried by the canny, warmly humorous musical instincts of its creators. ~ Thom Jurek
