Blake Mills and Pino Palladino visit Henry Miller to highlight the duo's new album.

Blake Mills and Pino Palladino had spent, collectively, around 65 years recording and performing before working with one another on John Legend’s 2016 album Darkness and Light.

Mills, who as a producer had worked with Fiona Apple and the Alabama Shakes, was searching for an element that would open something up on the Legend album. With Palladino, Mills found not only what he was looking for on that album, but also a recording partner for two albums of their own original music.

At the height of the pandemic, they released 2021’s Notes With Attachments, an upbeat jazz instrumental album highlighting the talents of saxophonist Sam Grendel and percussionist Chris Dave. This year, they released That Wasn’t A Dream, a lovely album highlighting new instrumentation with something of Robbie Robertson inspired ambience.

In September, Mills and Palladino began a 10-city international tour, something up until now they had not done as a duo. They spoke to the Weekly about their Big Sur show on Wednesday, Sept. 24:

Weekly: You have now been making music together for the last few years. 

Mills: There was a promotion we did for John [Legend]'s record after it was completed in New York. And on the night of one of the rehearsals, Pino had a session booked and invited me to come down to hear some of it and to play on it some of his original music. And after that session, I just kept thinking about that song that I played on [“Ekuté”]. Finally, we got a chance to just open it up at my house and play around with some arrangements and some production ideas. That led to another song doing sort of the same thing and a lot of what ended up becoming that first album was just from those sessions of opening stuff up and messing with it.

Palladino: Something I should add is it started off as Blake working on a project [of mine] and it became obvious very quickly that it should be a collaboration. I suggested that to Blake and he was open to it and that really opened things up. Just to sort of not to think of it as my own record, but as a project I was working on with someone else. We learned about each other's sort of musical tastes and got to experiment on a lot of the music.

Mills: It's just been an incredible journey since then.

Pino, you mentioned that this was material that you had already been working on for a bit. What clicked between you and Blake?

Palladino: I had some original sort of germs of ideas. For instance, "Ekuté" was literally a one chord jam that I had started with [percussionist] Chris Dave. And, you know, it was good. It was really good. We really got inside that arrangement and just made it a much more interesting and engaging piece. Blake had sort of harmonic ideas to go to different changes and stuff, to experiment with different sounds. It just really opened the thing up. It certainly wouldn't have sounded like that if I worked on it on my own.

Blake, can you talk about what are the differences between producing for someone else and producing your own music?

Mills: Well, the producer’s role changes pretty dramatically from project to project and song to song. The only commonality is that you're trying to help this artist, this other person, or these other people, actualize the best version of their idea. They can't be passive players in that, in my opinion. When I'm also in the role, I'll add to that. I'm a very passionate participant. I have strong opinions. As long as there's that strong sense of self from the artist, I think that that relationship can really work. When I'm working on something where I'm also the artist, I lose a lot of perspective. It's sort of a dangerous territory for me if it's not a highly collaborative project. Making these records [with Pino] has felt very natural to me. 

Pino, what is your perspective on the journey so far?

Palladino: It was a very different process recording the second album. We knew each other a lot better, and all the music you hear, pretty much is from us working on it together, from the initial ideas nearly on all the songs, and bringing them through to what you hear as the final finished kind of record. I think there's obviously growth there, just me and Blake getting to know each other personally, and also just musically. We concentrated with this album more on the performances coming from me and Blake and the compositions, and not relying on bringing in a whole host of musicians. We could have cast all kinds of characters, but it was a conscious decision to make this more about what we do as a duo.

Are either of you very familiar with the Henry Miller library? It seems like the perfect place for what you're talking about.

Palladino: No, not me. Monterey, to me, is just got sort of dreamy vision because of the history of it, basically with the Monterey Jazz Festival. So I'm really looking forward to it. And everybody tells me the Henry Miller is an amazing venue. 

Can you tell us a little bit about what we might expect as an audience from the upcoming performance?

Palladino: Yeah, you probably won't get very much talking [laughs]. 

Mills: I wish we knew. The main reason we reached out to Chris and Sam, among others, on the record, is because you never know what they're going to hear and what they're going to play and do. And I know that we're certainly not trying to recreate the album. By the time we get to Henry Miller, I feel like we'll have gone through some rehearsals and discovered some things that we don't know about yet. 

Palladino: We might also even split up by that point [laughs].

Mills: Yeah, that's right. We may have found it and then gone past it [laughs]. 

Let’s hope not.

Pino Palladino and Blake Mills (featuring Chris Dave and Sam Grendel) play Wednesday, Sept. 24 at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur. $147. Tickets are available on Eventbrite.