BUENOS AIRES — The audience at a recent concert erupted in rapturous screams as the group’s frontman walked on stage and began a drum beat, launching his band on an impromptu journey across musical genres that culminated an hour later in a standing ovation.
In a 30-year career, Miguel Tomasín has released more than 100 albums, helping turn his Argentine band into one of South America’s most influential underground actsand helped hundreds of people with disabilities express their voices through music.
Mr. Tomasín achieved this in part thanks to a distinctive artistic vision that stems from being born with Down syndrome, his family, fellow musicians and friends said. His story, they say, shows how art can help one overcome social barriers, and what can happen when attempting to push one’s talents to the next level, rather than focusing on their limitations.
“We make music so that people enjoy it,” said Mr. Tomasín in an interview at his home in the windy Argentine city of Rio Gallegos, near the southern tip of the country. Music is “the best, magical,” he added.
While his prolific output has not achieved commercial success, it has had a significant impact on how people with disabilities are perceived in Argentina and beyond.
It has also inspired members of his band, Reynols, to create long-running music workshops for people with disabilities. And other musicians they’ve worked with have started more bands that include people with developmental disabilities.
“Thanks to Miguel, many people who had never interacted with someone with Down syndrome were able to become aware of their world through music,” says Patricio Conlazo, an occasional member of Reynols who, after playing with Mr. Tomasín , started music projects for people with disabilities in southern Argentina.
from Reynols unconventional approach to music has also inspired established musicians.
“I was reminded by him that you can play music however you want,” said Mitsuru Tabata, a experienced Japanese experimental musician who has recorded with Reynols.
But the band’s freewheeling sound also has its detractors.
A prominent British music journalist, Ben Watson, called their music “annoying noise” in his book “Honesty Is Explosive!” from 2010. where he suggested that Mr. Tomasín’s presence in the band was a publicity stunt.
In the early years, the band struggled to find venues and labels interested in their improvisational sound. A turning point came nearly a quarter of a century ago, in 1998, when they became unexpected a house band on an Argentine public television program, reaching new audiences.
This job made Mr. Tomasín the first Argentinian with Down syndrome to be employed by a national broadcaster.
“It was revolutionary, because people with these conditions were largely hidden from public view,” says Claudio Canali, who helped produce the program.
A New York Times reporter and a photographer spent a week in Argentina to see Mr. Tomasín and to document his life, both in Buenos Aires and Rio Gallegos. Mr. Tomasín speaks in short sentences that are largely intelligible to a Spanish speaker, but sometimes an accompanying family member is needed to put them in context.
However, Mr. Tomasín is 58, but like many other artists, he lowers his age by insisting that he is 54.
He was born in Buenos Aires, the second of three children of middle-class parents. His father was a naval captain, his mother a fine arts graduate who stayed home to raise the children.
In the 1960s, according to his younger sister, Jorgelina Tomasín, most Argentine families sent children with Down syndrome to special boarding schools, which in practice were little more than asylums.
After visiting some of them, his parents decided to raise Mr. Tomasín at home, where he was treated no differently from his siblings.
He began showing an interest in sounds as a toddler, banging kitchen pots and playing a family piano, prompting his grandparents to buy him a toy drum kit.
Later, after returning home from school, Mr. Tomasín went straight to his room and played all three cassettes he owned from start to finish, making crooners Julio Iglesias and Palito Ortega an inescapable home presence for years to come, Ms. Tomasín said.
In the early 1990s, the close-knit household began to break up, as his siblings grew up and left home, leaving Mr. Tomasín, then a young adult, to feel isolated.
To fill the void, his parents decided to send him to a music school, but they struggled to find one that would accept him.
One day, in 1993, they tried an unassuming place they came across while shopping in their Buenos Aires neighborhood, the School for the Comprehensive Formation of Musicians, which was run by young avant-garde rockers who taught classes to improve their rehearsal space. subsidize.
“‘Hello, I’m Miguel, a very famous drummer,'” Roberto Conlazo, who ran the school with his brother Patricio, recalls Mr. Tomasín saying at their introduction, despite never having touched a professional until then . drum kit.
The school became an unexpected artistic home for Mr. Tomasín. In a country that remains deeply divided by the legacy of a military dictatorship and a Marxist uprising, it was rare for a military family to even associate with Bohemian artists, let alone entrust a child to them.
But Mr. Tomasín’s family and the artists eventually became lifelong friends, an early example of how his lack of social prejudice has led others to reconsider long-held assumptions.
His spontaneity and lack of insecurities made Mr. Tomasín a natural improviser and ideal for the school’s goal of making music without preconceived notions.
“We were looking for as free a musical universe as possible,” says Alan Courtis, who taught at the school. “Miguel became the alarm that awakened the sleeping side of our brains.”
Roberto Conlazo and Mr. Courtis already played in a group that would eventually become Reynols, a name loosely inspired by Burt Reynolds.
After giving Mr. Tomasín some drum lessons, they decided to bring him into the band. However, their collaboration got off to an uncertain start.
During one of their first shows, in 1994, a mob of high school students broke into a mosh pit, which Mr. Courtis and Roberto Conlazo stoked up by spraying deodorant in the faces of the audience, ripping out guitar strings with pliers and bloodcurdling noise from primitive loudspeakers.
When Mr. Tomasín’s father, Jorge Tomasín, approached the band after the show, they resigned themselves to never seeing Miguel again, sure that his father would disapprove.
“’Guys, I didn’t understand much of what you were playing,’ Roberto Conlazo recalled the father saying, ‘but I saw Miguel very happy. So go ahead.’”
Those words were the green light for the ensuing three decades of creativity that has led to approximately 120 albums, US and European tours, and collaborations with some of the world’s most respected experimental musicians. Reynols divides the proceeds from shows and music sales in equal shares, making Mr. Tomasín one of the few professional musicians with Down syndrome in the world.
The band first gained widespread national attention with the afternoon TV appearance. A popular presenter, Dr. Mario Socolinsky, had interviewed Reynols on his daytime program “Good Afternoon Health,” in which he gave health tips. Impressed with Mr. Tomasín’s integration into the band, he invited them to become the show’s house musicians, giving Reynols an improbable task of playing to a regular audience five times a week for a year.
Reynols’ next breakthrough came in 2001, when Mr. Courtis and Roberto Conlazo went on the band’s first US tour. Although Mr. Tomasín decided not to participate, the tour introduced his work to the global underground music network that has supported the band’s later career.
In the following years, the band’s focus on improvisation drove the extraordinary production of albums. Because each jam session with Mr. Tomasín could produce a different sound, the band has released dozens of them as albums on small record labels in editions of a few hundred copies.
After seeing Mr. Tomasín’s performance on TV, families all over Argentina started contacting the band and asking them to teach music to their children with disabilities. That brought Mr. Courtis and Roberto and Patricio Conlazo formed a collective called Sol Mayor that brought people with different physical and developmental disabilities together to play music.
Their approach, they believe, highlights the beauty of music that falls short of Western standards, such as playing in an octave scale.
Inspired by the work with Reynols, other musicians have started bands for people with disabilities in Norway and France.
Mr. Tomasín’s family says they were able to give him the support to develop his creativity, thanks in part to their relatively prosperous economic position, and recognized the social inequalities that prevent many people with disabilities from reaching their potential.
At a recently sold-out Reynols concert in Buenos Aires, Mr. Tomasín sang and played all the instruments on stage in front of 600 fans, posing for selfies with admirers after the show.
Earlier this year, Mr. Tomasín moved from Buenos Aires to Rio Gallegos to live with his brother Juan Mario, a former army officer who now teaches English. In the afternoons, Mr. Tomasín dances to Argentine folk music, cooks and gardens at a local center for people with disabilities, often wearing his favorite Reynols T-shirt.
Mr. Tomasín’s bandmates say that one of his greatest gifts is helping people become better versions of themselves without even being aware of his influence.
“He teaches without teaching, just enjoying his life,” said Roberto Conlazo.
Mr. Tomasín’s big plan for the near future is to organize a concert in his new city, bringing his bandmates from Buenos Aires, 2,500 kilometers away, and inviting his new friends.
“Have them come to my school,” he said, “so we can all play together.”
Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo and Natalie Alcoba contributed research from Buenos Aires.