Tosin Abasi
Anyone who thinks there’s nothing new left to be done on guitar, watch this space.
Tosin Abasi once observed that “guitar is the skateboard of instruments” – and few young gunslingers have a bigger bag of tricks than him. Coming of age on the Washington DC circuit of the early 90s, the Nigerian-American’s eye-popping technique was forged at the crossroads of hair-metal and grunge; he recalls renting go-faster ‘chop builder’ tuition videos from his local music shop (“There’d be a dude on the front with an Ibanez and big hair”), but fell hard for the angst of Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden. “It was the first music I’d listened to that had emotional complexity to it,” he remembered.
By 2009, in the ascendancy as the mastermind behind US prog-metal instrumentalists Animals As Leaders, Abasi didn’t have an Eddie Vedder, a Kurt Cobain or a Chris Cornell to give voice to the emotions behind his songs. Instead, as he explained to D’Addario, this most powerful of trios relied on a plate-spinning brand of musicianship to weave elaborate soundscapes and evoke anything from first love to blind fury, all without a frontman in sight. “There isn’t ‘a guy’, y’know?” said Abasi, “but we convey anxiety harmonically or rhythmically.”
To hear Abasi play guitar – particularly on 2014’s standout Animals As Leaders album The Joy Of Motion – is to suspend conventional wisdom, as the 38-year-old navigates his fearsome-looking eight-string Ibanez signature model with all 10 fingers, dipping into the modern-jazz influence of cats like Kurt Rosenwinkel, while almost removing the need for a drummer with a percussive double-thumb slap technique borrowed from funk-bass great Victor Wooten. “The guitar is such a capable instrument when it comes to sounding like full-blown music,” he told the Reverb website.
To describe him as a shredder is reductive (“That seems like a pretty worthless motivation”). Yet it speaks volumes of Abasi’s stone-cold chops that he was able to not only hold his own on the Generation Axe tour of 2016, but also reduce stage-mates Steve Vai, Zakk Wylde and Nuno Bettencourt to goggle-eyed schoolboys as he aired his next-generation string-slapping (find the clip on YouTube). Instrumental guitarists rarely become household names, but don’t bet against Abasi. HY
Listen to this: Physical Education (Animals As Leaders, The Joy Of Motion, 2014)