Interview: Giorgio Tuma
A chat with Giorgio Tuma about his music and and the collaborative creative process.
No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Dear readers: In my previous post, I wrote about the music of Giorgio Tuma. I forwarded the post to his label, Elefant Records, along with a request for a brief interview, which Giorgio granted graciously.
Carlos Alvarenga: When can you remember being introduced to music?
Giorgio Tuma: I was introduced to music when I was very young. My uncle and my big brothers were important in my first exposures to music, and from an early age there was something musical in me. I started to play drums in a punk rock band when I was young, and I listened to The Clash, who were important in my life. Later, when I was around seventeen, I discovered Bossa Nova and the music of Brazil, and it instantly took hold of me.
CA: At what point did you decide to become a professional musician and to make music your life’s work?
GT: Carlos, you must understand that I am not a professional musician. I’m not a trained musician in the normal sense—I play just a little bit of guitar. Unfortunately, I don’t make a living from music, so I consider it a hobby—indeed, a great passion. I must thank the team at Elefant for giving me the possibility of making music from the ideas I have had at certain moments in my life. All my music is born from ideas, and they are realized with a lot of help from my musician-friends. Most of all, I am a listener—a very, very passionate listener.
CA: You say that your songs are born from ideas. What does an idea look like at first? Is it a sound? Is it a feeling? Is it something that you want to communicate?
GT: It is something that I feel. As I told you, I listen to a lot of records—Italian movie soundtracks, Brazilian music, but also contemporaries such as Stereolab and the Swedish group, Komeda. After all the listening, an idea develops in my mind. At this point, I shape the first form of the idea on the guitar. The guitar is where I shape my personal music impressions.
CA: How exactly does that process work?
I usually start with a melodic idea I discover on the guitar, on which I explore all the possible arrangements. After I have created a basic musical idea, I show it to my friend Alice Rossi, who then helps me with the words. She writes almost all the lyrics in English.
As for the music itself, I also explain my idea to a friend of mine, who is an arranger. Because he’s a trained musician, he can write down the music I have in my mind. This part is impossible for me, of course, because I don’t have the necessary musical knowledge. In addition to his help, I receive help from other people to make the tracks: from my brother Marco, who plays the flute; from the singer Lætitia Sadier; the fantastic American composer Michael Andrews, who helped me on the last two records; and from other musician-friends in many places, who each complete one piece of the puzzle.
I have made all my records in this way.
CA: Do you prepare the final edit of the tracks?
GT: Yes. I am involved from beginning to end in the creation of each part of a track, but in the process there are lots of people doing things: arrangements, singing, and playing the instruments. In the mix I work with a sound engineer named Stefano Manca at Sudestudio. He is absolutely essential, and without his contribution I could never have completed my albums. It’s true that I oversee the project from start to finish, but all the recording, editing, and mixing work is Stefano’s. I simply indicate whether it’s acceptable or if something needs changing.
In the end, though, the final versions you hear are always mine. It’s my job to guide the idea from the first conception in my mind until it becomes the track that you hear.
CA: It seems that you work more like a movie director than a traditional musician—using the talents of various artists for specific parts and then putting all their work together into a final form. Is this a fair description?
GT: Yes—very much so. I think that is a good way to describe what I do.
CA: By the way, is there a reason you have not studied music formally at this point in your life? Are you worried it would affect your creative process?
GT: There isn’t really a specific reason. If I could go back, I would enroll in a conservatory to study music—especially composition. It was a mistake on my part not to study music, because maybe today I could be working as an arranger and have turned music into a career
CA: Let’s talk a about a different topic—the musicians who have influenced you. You mentioned The Clash and Stereolab, but the one I want to talk about is Bill Evans. I took up playing the piano to play Evans, so I would like to understand your interest in his music.
GT: Bill Evans is one of the most important musicians of my life. I have heard much of his music, and you can hear his influence starting from my third record, In the morning we'll meet, and his influence continued into my third and fourth albums. I remember that when I was writing In the morning we'll meet, I played many of his albums, especially Moonbeams. Evans was not the only influence, though. I was also influenced by American filmmakers such as Elia Kazan and Italian movie makers such as Vittorio de Sica, who is very important for our national cinematic tradition.
Other big influences were Nick Drake and Tim Hardin. I feel the same sensitivity as I do in Evans in all of them. Also important to me are Piero Piccioni, Maurice Ravel, and even Burt Bacharach. They all give me the same feeling as Evans.
CA: One more thought on Evans. There is a kind of melancholy that I hear in a lot of his music—songs such as “My foolish heart,” “Some other time,” and “Lucky to be me.” It’s the chords and the ideas he discovers and that transform a song when he plays it. Do you agree that you share some of that melancholy?
GT: Absolutely. Yes—melancholy is a kind of sensitivity, one found in most of my music. It is the melancholy of remembering I feel internally that I try to express in my music. A song is an internalized version of something in my past. My music is a mixture of my memories—how I felt on a given day when I was four- or five-years years old, how the sky looked or how the air felt on my skin. The sounds you hear are my remembrances all mixed together. This is what you hear in my songs. Every song is an internalized version of events in my past.
CA: So—a final thought. It sounds as though your music is a kind of time machine. It takes you and us backwards in time to moments in your childhood that are still alive in your mind, and when the voyage is over, it returns us to the present.
GT: Yes. That’s exactly what it is.
CA. I think this a good point at which to end our chat, Giorgio. Thank you very much for your time.
GT: My thanks to you and your readers, Carlos. Ciao.
Postscript: I found Giorgio’s confession that he is not a trained musician remarkable. His music is pure imagination—dreams that those who care about his work help make real. As such, his body of work is a lesson in inspiration, friendship, and love. May we all find such a passion and such friends.
Ancient Medals Blue squares In tidy lines Stray thoughts Warped walls Slumping Into a chasm You can't always settle All the pulsing thrills That stagger out of your mind Blue squares Warped walls Ripples Out of your mind You can't always settle All the pulsing thrills That stagger out of your mind Maude Hope by Giorgio Tuma, Lyrics by Giorgio Tuma and Lætitia Sadier