The evening was sore and tender until the first symphony began at St George, with the Commonwealth Festival Orchestra and Choir, among others, lighting up the whole of Hanover Square with classic performances. It was a quiet Thursday in the middle of April, 2018, where Oluwaseun Adeshina’s quirky symbiosis with the Double Bass provoked my interest in his stellar musicianship for the first time.
Later that year, Adeshina’s potential again struck a chord during his spirited rendition on the double bass at Tunde Jegede’s showcase alongside the Nok Orchestra, in 2018. The piece, dubbed “Jairaby (a selection from Mande Suite)” needed more than just Adeshina’s pacing to balance the humbling aura of the Kora. It required a higher presence of mind and unison with the performance to have played such error-free passages within the complex pace that defined the piece. Adeshina’s mastery positions his performance as a fulcrum of tempos, and even when he decides to experiment it’s always alluring to see how he rubber-bands the emotions and harmonies together to make his point.
It became apparent, last October, at the Google Office, in London, where he performed alongside the Nok Orchestra in celebration of Black History Month, that Adeshina’s futuristic ideas are perhaps the cherry on his cake of talents. If not for anything, but the sheer interpolation of classic music with the iconic indigenous percussions of the African talking drums deserve an applause for the attempt. Still, Adeshina’s brilliant control of tension and release give life to his fusions, encircling them with a character of their own, and one that arrests attention. His performance sketch “Gan’gan Soro (talking drum is speaking)” floats on a subtle sequencing technique that amplifies the rich harmonies of the percussion. It’s still very uncommon to see such a beautiful responsorial with the Talking drum, side by side with Violin, Cello and Flutes.
Oluwaseun Adeshina is a Sectional bass player at the Ealing Symphony orchestra and has performed many masterpieces with the orchestra including: Sibelius, Berlioz, Kalinnikov, Sergei Prokofiev, William Wordsworth, Josef Suk, among others. He also performed at Libianca’s debut show at London’s BBC Radio1xtra on the song “People”.
