the one and only pino

i was listening to d-angelo's voodoo on the way to work this morning. i almost crashed my truck a few times because i can't just casually listen to that record. that album defines music in many ways for me. and it definitely defines bass playing.

for those of you who do not know, pino palladino is my favorite bass player of all time. he surpasses (because of his versatility and unique style) all of the rest. sorry bootsy, sorry paul, sorry jaco, sorry flea. there is only one pino palladino.

if you don't recognize the name, here is a discography. but this guy has played with everyone. simon and garfunkel, don henley, eric clapton, stinking tears for fears!!! and of course, the new school soul and hip hop gurus like kweli, the soulquarians, erykah badu, common, jill scott...and let's not forget his latest project, the john mayer trio with john and steve jordan (not to be slept on).

i knew his bass playing before voodoo, but voodoo was the record that blew my mind and set him apart from the rest. voodoo is the best r&b/soul record of the last 10 years HANDS DOWN. many would argue a much longer time frame.

the very first track on the record, "playa playa" establishes the tone of the record. it's incredibly loose, with ?uest and pino bending the time so much that it sounds at the same time a complete mess and a masterpiece. i have listened to voodoo probably hundreds of times since it came out, and pino still moves me when i hear it.

?uestlove wrote on his blog a long time ago about how they came to know pino. it went like this:

i think this was the first week we had the prophet of james jamerson's school of bass walkin Pino Pallidino with us. BB King invitied D to participate on his duets project so we took a sunday off from the voodoo stuff to pay BB a visit. because Steve Jordan was the drummer i stayed in the lobby and chilled with "lil mike" (son) while D took an hour out to handle his business (never known d to be anything less than a one take person---however his background vocal layering is YEAR consuming)--but once finished he walked into the hallway in a panic looking for me and the look on his face was like he seen a ghost. he told me "yo...we found our bass player!!!"---

i took a peep in the studio to see most of the paul schaffer cats and some other session cats....i saw this tall lankey white cat on bass....but of course he couldn't have been talking about that cat.

"ahmir you dont hear me....he "gets it"!!

"it" being what i guess now we can call the lessons that the honorable james j dilla yancey has laid before us (henceforth i refer to dilla in a sense that malcolm referred to the honoarable ellijah muhammad)---once again i was saying in my head: it takes a special brother to even understand the approach we were trying to take (we wanted to take the dead sorry a@@ state of black music and kick it in the a@@. and if that meant we had to "unlearn" the art of playing then so be it. if hip hop and all things that followed took the "life" out of the artform we wanted to make it as dirty and f$&#@* up as we could make it) now if black people were looking at us like we were crazy (in 2006 most cats praise Voodoo---but in 1996 playing those demos? we heard s$&% like this....

"um there seems to be a discrepency in the drumming...i can't follow it...it's off"
-potential but alas close but no cameo guitarist lenny kravitz, when telling D he can't "groove" to what we laid out before him to play a song on the album.

so of course now i see the evidence of white people drowning themselves in black culture ride or die. but back in that time you just couldn't tell me that this english cat whose claim to fame was his fretless basswork on "The Lady In Red" (chris deburgh?) could hang with 2 dilla students.

sure enough we high tailed it to electric lady studios and without a word we gave pino the test. no cue. no warning (d instructs him once "stay in G") just instinct. and all of that oveerexxxxxaaaaagerrrratteed slowing down stuff i do in the bridge was a test to see if he could hang. and d%*& it he did! he got "it"

dilla showed us "it" (in this case flirting with time) and this was the song that showed us the captain of our ship was gonna be pino.

and so it is, pino definitely gets "it". shoot, he might be "it".