Gürol Ağırbaş is a bass guitarist and composer born in Istanbul in 1966. He is known for his Bass Songs, which is considered one of the first albums to feature the bass guitar as a solo instrument in Türkiye, and as the composer of "Alnavut Kaldırımı" sung by Demet Sağıroğlu. He is the brother of percussionist Birol Ağırbaş.
He comes from a family of musicians: his father is drummer Salim Ağırbaş, his grandfather is saxophonist İsmail Ağırbaş, and his uncle is drummer Yüksel Ağırbaş. However, he stayed away from music in his youth and graduated from the foundry department of Sultanahmet Industrial Vocational High School. When he could not pursue this profession, he started playing bass guitar with the guidance of his father.
Stage and studio years
He played professionally for the first time in the İzzet Uğurlu Orchestra in the early 1980s; Then he took part in the İbrahim Şahin Orchestra for a long time. A short-lived conservatory trial was left unfinished due to military service; He did his military service in the army's harmonica. When he was only 18 years old, he participated in the Eurovision Türkiye qualifiers with a composition.
During this period, he attracted the attention of Onno Tunç and joined Sezen Aksu's orchestra and played in this group for several years.
In the following years, he played bass guitar in concerts and recordings of names such as Kayahan, Nilüfer, Ajda Pekkan and Zülfü Livaneli; He has his signature on many albums of Turkish pop music. His best-known work as a composer is "Arnavut Kaldırımı", which was included in Demet Sağıroğlu's first album Kınalı Bebek, released in 1994; The lyrics belong to Sağıroğlu and the music belongs to Ağırbaş.
solo albums
In 1995, he released the album Bass Şarkıları, which focuses on the bass guitar, and gave a solo concert at Rumeli Hisarı in the same year. Bass Songs 2 followed in 1998. He started the Bridges project with Murat Çelik in 2006; They reinterpreted forgotten film music with Anatolian sounds in the project's 2010 album Köprüler – Beyaz Perde.
All of the compositions in Bas Şarkıları 3, which was released in 2018 after a long preparation process, belonged to him; Names such as Birsen Tezer, Bülent Ortaçgil, Hüsnü Arkan, Jehan Barbur, Şevval Sam and Ceylan Ertem took part in the album. Ağırbaş used his own voice for the first time in a song on this album.
Ağırbaş has a special place among musicians in Türkiye by bringing the bass guitar, which has laid the groundwork for other people's songs for many years, to the fore in his own albums.
