Gerald Toto projects an unparalleled voice: feline, sensuous, deliciously ambiguous, male and female in the same inflexion. This exceptional voice, unlike any other among the new singing voices of the French speaking world, naturally finds its kinship among the Brazilian songs, by its intimate unsettling tone. This knowledgeable experienced nonchalance is constantly harnessed in its delicious rippling, evoking now and then the Caetano Veloso's sweet tone.
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This discreet congeniality is nothing of a surprise. That's because Gerald Toto's subtle music, West Indian from Paris, is undoubtedly wrought by its West Indian origins, but is far from the clichés of the contemporary West Indian music, frozen in its sunny folklore like never before. If Toto's music belongs without any doubt to a Creole aesthetics by its cross breeding, this is how it makes honey out of everything that's around, this is how it seizes all the genres which make today's popular music (Nu Soul, R'n'B, pop, jazz, folk, Caribbean music) in order to integrate them into a heterogeneous, hybrid universe, constantly wrought by the otherness but without any collision or tension – convinced that a fragile harmony will necessarily uprise from this cluster of disparate influences – that an ultra contemporary beauty is at work in this type of syncretic adventure. It must be said that for Gerald, the notion of opening to the difference means much more than an esthetic principle; it is an authentic rule for life.