Robin Mullarkey Steps Out with “Bring Own Ball”: A Summer Groove with Irresistible Bass Tone
Bassist Robin Mullarkey has been wowing audiences for years with music genius Jacob Collier, and he’s also renowned for his work with Brotherly, a band that fuses jazz with contemporary dance aesthetics. In fact, he has played on numerous records.
However, he’s never released solo music – until now.
Mullarkey has released “Bring Own Ball,” which marks the first single under his own name from an upcoming album entitled Black Swan. The song, released on July 24th, is a “bubbly, nostalgic summer bop” with a perfect groove and a bass tone to die for. We reached out for the inside scoop on Mullarkey’s new project.
“The album was written as a kind of response to my older writing (Brotherly), which was very complex and densely arranged,” he explains. “I guess there’s a lot of that with the new album too but it was really important to me that for this project we track the band together and capture the magic that great improvisers can bring to a simple idea. ‘Bring Own Ball’ is a great example of that. I brought a very simple 4-bar melody and some chords to the studio, and we literally just jammed it, got creative with parts and sounds, and instinctively created drops and breakdown sections. It was so much fun. What you hear is literally the first take of us ever playing this together.”
“Bring Own Ball” is our first look at the album, but Mullarkey gave No Treble some more insight.
“The album Black Swan was named after a Wayne Shorter tune. I was approached to put on a couple of shows at Ronnie Scott’s and Wayne had recently passed, so I decided to kind of re-imagine his High Life album which I’m a great fan of. We were all quite taken with the impact that learning those very unique and beautiful tunes had on us,” the bassist explains. “It really galvanised a common thread and an approach to improvising that we hadn’t experienced before. Initially, I was wanting to record those tracks with our own unique spin, but as the recording dates drew close, I decided to instead write my own material in the spirit of those shows. Stylistically, the album draws on a very diverse group of influences from hip hop to broken beat and of course, a very contemporary and London-inspired form of jazz.”
As mentioned before, Mullarkey captured some incredible bass tones to record Black Swan, and he gave us a list of his treasured bass gear on the album.
“I took a bunch of basses to the studio (Angelic Studios) but I think I mainly ended up using my ’65 P bass, which, unusually for me, has flats on at the moment,” he says. “The Moollon 4-string Jazz also got used a lot, as well as my Wilcock Mullarkey and a Fender Bass VI, which is basically a guitar tuned down an octave. Other than an octave pedal, I really didn’t track with any effects, and I mixed the album with a pretty honest approach to bass sounds – mostly DI with a little saturation and compression.”
“Bring Own Ball” is streaming now on Bandcamp, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. Black Swan will be out later this year, so stay tuned for mre details. Mullarkey will be on tour with Jacob Collier this summer.
In his time with No Treble, Kevin has met hundreds of amazing bassists and interviewed icons like Jack Casady, Victor Wooten, Les Claypool, Marcus Miller, and more. He's a gigging bassist performing jazz in Northern Virginia and bluegrass with The Plate Scrapers up and down the East Coast. Kevin appreciates all genres of music, from R&B to metal and everything in between. Connect with Kevin on Facebook and check his performance schedule on his website.
