Pino Palladino & Blake Mills "That Wasn't A Dream" (Album of the Month 09/25)

The musical fade-out perhaps has its counterpart in something like the morning fade-awake. Between sleeping and waking, you slip out of the dream world into the everyday world and explore what was a dream and what is reality.

"That Wasn't A Dream" is the second album by Pino Palladino and Blake Mills, which explores this in-between. Both sonically and instrumentally, boundaries are dissolved: Mills sings catchy melodies on his fretless guitar, as it were, while Palladino lets his bass sound virtuosic and groovy, trained on D'Angelo. The aim, they say, is to create a meditative sound world reduced to the minimum. They skillfully create this by forming a unity of opposites as if in a dream. And this is how they congenially intertwine composition and improvisation.

The final song is a contradiction: "That Was A Dream". Are the closing words true? It doesn't matter, because the cultural scientist Joseph Vogl has confirmed that happiness is ultimately half-sleep; that's why you can't get tired of listening to this extremely successful album. Don't miss out on the fact that both will soon be delighting us at the Leipziger Jazztage!