Notes With Attachments is an album-length, instrumental collaboration between the bassist Pino Palladino and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist/producer Blake Mills.
Recorded in stages over two and a half years, Notes With Attachments brings together a preeminent group of musicians from the worlds of jazz, R&B, pop, and beyond: the drummer Chris Dave(D’Angelo, Anderson .Paak); the innovative saxophonists Sam Gendel, Marcus Strickland, and Jacques Schwartz-Bart; the keyboardist Larry Goldings (James Taylor, John Scofield); and others. It is both a producers’ album and a players’ album, exploring bits of musical vocabulary common to the two musicians, then defamiliarizing them.
Pino Palladino (b. 1957, Cardiff, Wales) is a Grammy Award winning songwriter, producer and bassist who helped create the rhythm-section sound of D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Black Messiah, and over a four-decade career has worked with artists including Keith Richards, Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Nine Inch Nails, Questlove, John Mayer, Paul Simon, Jeff Beck, Herbie Hancock and Adele.
Blake Mills (b. 1986, Santa Monica, California) two-time Grammy Awards Producer of the Year nominee Blake Mills has released four solo albums and produced and recorded with artists such as Alabama Shakes, Fiona Apple, Bob Dylan, John Legend, Perfume Genius, Jim James, Moses Sumney, Laura Marling, Phoebe Bridgers, Cass McCombs, The Killers, Sara Bareilles, Weyes Blood and Randy Newman. His most recent album Mutable Set, released last year, was praised by Pitchfork as “a hushed collection that floats through the subconscious like a tender dream” and earned their Best New Music title.
They met while working on John Legend’s 2016 album Darkness In Light, for which Mills, as producer, sought out Palladino and his frequent rhythm-section collaborator, the drummer Chris Dave. “A switch had flipped, working on Legend’s music with Pino. I just felt really drawn to him.” A notion evolved for Mills to produce a Pino Palladino solo album.“
