While waiting for the publication of Paseo del Bajo Vol. 2, scheduled for the next December 9th, we propose here an english version of our original review for Paseo del Bajo Vol. 1, released by Sebastián Tozzola at the end of 2020.
Sebastián Tozzola is an Argentinian musician. He performs as solo bass clarinet for the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, but he is also a composer and a bass player, as well as an Ernie Ball Music Man artist. He has a frightening curriculum (you can find something here and here) and he is a very talented musician, instinctive and technical at the same time, both on the clarinet and the electric bass. I ran into him as a bass player during 2019, thanks to a video published on his Instagram and shared by a page dedicated to the electric bass, Baixonatural. I literally fell in love with the sound of his fretless and, aware that I had never gone not even remotely close to having a sound comparable to his, I decided to do one of those things that I rarely do, almost exclusively with non-Italian people: I decided to write to him to express my admiration for is sound, but also to get rid of some technical curiosities (let’s say, some nerdy bass stuff). What I discovered is that, in addition to being a stratospheric musician (but this can be understood at the first note), Sebastián is above all an exquisite person, helpful and extremely kind: it certainly has something to do with his being a teacher too, and with the importance intelligent people place on education and the transfer of knowledge and experience. So I willingly started following him, not without gaping at his recordings, duly documented on his Instagram, and today I’m here to advise you to listen to his latest solo album, Paseo del Bajo, released last December 4th (ndr, 2020) for Club Del Disco editions. Paseo del Bajo is entirely centered on the electric bass, and features a large number of autographed compositions by Sebastián together with some reinterpretations of great classic songs from Argentinian tradition: you can find jazz, tango, a bit of South American melancholy, a lot of Patituccish mistura fina and above all a very deep and fascinating melodic expressiveness. Within these fifteen tracks you can breathe deeply a lot of traditional Argentinian music, from chamamé to echoes of tango, from bolero to candombe, from cumbia to the most popular folk borrowed from the classic guitar ensembles that everyone reminds thinking about South America; Sebastián‘s phrasing ranges seamlessly from the typically jazzy flavor that brings to mind several sacred monsters (Jaco Pastorius and the aforementioned John Patitucci above all) to the classicism of claire de lune and contrapuntal polyphonies that comes from the clarinetist’s classical training: an enormous musical baggage, evocative and very deep, full of fascinating inventions and colors.
From these various inspirations emerges the opening track, A bajo y Pa’fuera. The song is an instrumental up-tempo in which a delightful cumbia rhythm underlines the subtle melancholy of the theme, an intrinsic characteristic of a large part of the music we commonly associate with South America, imagined as a land of romantic contrasts; moreover, on the track we immediately admire the elegant, Patituccish phrasing by Sebastián. On Deserción it is Sebastián‘s dreamy fretless that dominates the song, supported by the discreet work of Emiliano Gimenez on drums. A delicate cascade of harmonics introduces Y Vuela, a ballad built on a multi-part harmonization and the first piece on album featuring Sebastián‘s voice: the song takes off with the entrance of the drums and, again, of the fretless and bass clarinet. Candombe Bajito recovers the tradition of candombe, a popular music widespread in some areas of Argentina but born in Uruguay from the musical traditions of freed African slaves: the piece is built on a few strong percussive elements, which support a bass work halfway between rhythmic solidity and purely melodic expressiveness. A truly beautiful thing that can be heard during this performance, and almost everywhere on the disc, is Sebastián‘s voice accompanying his phrasing singing-along with the melodic line: when you go to class the first thing you learn is to accompany the theme and the solo singing with your own voice, and I firmly believe that this is an inescapable step to find one’s voice on the instrument. Candombe Bajito is followed by the lightness of the nocturnal 7/8 of Miniatura a la Luna 1 (Siete Octavos para Medialuna), which clearly quotes Okonkolé Y Trompa (a piece written by Pastorius and the great Don Alias for the solo debut of the great Jaco) and fades gently into a rain of notes. The romantically Latin-American pace of the very elegant chamamé Al Mar, one of the singles extracted from the work, flows into the ballad Al Desandar, and subsequently into the classic and contrapuntal flavor of Bach‘s Fugue VII for 3 Voices (Del Clave Bien Temperado), masterfully reinterpreted by Sebastián armed only with his electric bass. The ballad Despertar is built on voice, harmonics, a few rhythmic elements and a fretless bass engaged in designing liquid and fascinating melodies, while La Nochera, a piece taken from the songbook of Los Chalchaleros (one of the most important traditional Argentinian musical ensembles, dedicated to various musical forms of local folklore, such as zamba, cueca, chacarera, gato and chamamé again) proposes a folk tinged with melancholy and featuring a gently poetic text. La Nochera is followed by the piano and bass duet of Sol de Abril, played and composed with the pianist Andrés Pilar and characterized by a delicate interplay. Amardel combines the clarinet with a fretless phrasing in full Pastorius mood, and a light rhythm creates a delicate accompainment for the bass while exposing a fascinating and nostalgic theme, again sung in unison with the voice (as was already the case in Candombe Bajito). Miniatura a la Laguna 1 (de las Gaviotas) is an episode of choral music, entirely based on the intertwining of the voices, an introduction to the reinterpretation of the classic bolero Perfidia, a famous composition by the Mexican marimbist and composer Alberto Domínguez. The work closes with the introspective folk of Mi breve Pasar, another autograph composition by Sebastián.
The variety of registers that Sebastián Tozzola manages to cover with his electric basses is prodigious but what astonish us above all is his fretless wonderful, distinctive sound: Sebastián‘s musical inspirations range from a Pastorius-influenced phrasing (Amardel) to an elegant taste for rhythmic tango bailades, drawing as much from traditional music as from various forms of musical hybrids with more contemporary flavour. Paseo del Bajo is a fascinating work, very rich, full of ideas and intuitions, composed and executed with grace and where inspiration is at the highest levels: if you are also a bass player, then the lyrical fingerstyle of which Sebastián is capable cannot leave you insensitive. Beyond the obvious technical skills, we are talking about a musician with an overwhelming expressiveness, with a dense, very deep, totally personal sound despite the many important references, an artist who is above all a reference, someone from whom one can only learn. But Paseo del Bajo is above all an album full of music for curious listeners, who want to learn something new, to listen to something they may have never heard of (half of the musical genres I mentioned in this review I had never heard of before; I was so intrigued by these fifteen tracks that they prompted me to try to find out more and more, and that’s the thing with great Art). Paseo del Bajo allows you to get in touch with an entire musical world, related to the Argentinian tradition, that is perhaps not so well known at our latitudes. Borrowing the words that Borges used to describe the tango (perhaps the most universally famous expression of Argentinian traditional music), the one we hear in Paseo del Bajo is “a language in which tragedy, melancholy, irony, love, jealousy, memories, the beloved barrio, the mother, sorrows and joys, smells of brothels and brawlers coexist”; a sort of monologue composed against the background of Buenos Aires, a city that, keep quoting the great Argentinian author, is in fact the “milonga fischiettata che non riconosciamo e ci emoziona”.