COLLECTIVE SOLO

One artist. One story. Many peoples.

Collective Solo is the solo project of percussionist, composer, and artist Diego Calasso — a performance born from the fusion of languages, times, and cultures.

With percussion, voice, flute, and electronic instruments, Diego builds a layered sonic universe live, using a loop station as his primary creative partner. Like a DJ who plays live, he blends rhythms created in the moment with existing songs, poetry, melodies, and fragments of Brazilian popular culture — crafting an experience that is at once concert, ritual, and collective memory.

The Collective Solo repertoire dives deep into the roots: samba, maracatu, capoeira, forró, côco, and other rhythms that carry within them the history of a people. Each performance is a journey through these sounds — alive, pulsating, recreated in real time by a single body.

The project exists in two formats. In concerts, Diego brings this entire blend to the stage in a free and performative way, engaging the audience through sound and presence. In workshops and classes, the repertoire takes on a didactic focus: rhythms are presented one by one, with their historical contexts, their African and indigenous origins, and their meanings within Brazilian culture — telling the story of a people through rhythm is, here, also an act of resistance and celebration.

Collective Solo is proof that a single person can carry an entire world within — and make that world resound.