The Beautiful Obscurity of Giorgio Tuma
On insomnia, Italian melancholy, and the quiet genius of a musician few have heard of—but many should.
Stars don’t beg the world for attention; their beauty forces us to look up.
― Matshona Dhliwayo
Dear readers: I paused CaL a little over a year ago when the workload of my PhD program left me no time to write for Substack. With those demands now behind me, it’s my pleasure to return to this project. As always, thank you for reading.
It is a curse of mine that I suffer from insomnia more often than I’d like, and late nights often find me on YouTube, seeking new works to explore. About a year ago, on one such night, I came across the music of Giorgio Tuma. Born in the town of Lecce, located in Italy’s “heel,” Tuma grew up listening to a wide variety of music—The Clash, Stereolab, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Ennio Morricone, and Marvin Gaye are just a few of his influences—and has devoted his career to making music that seems to exist outside of its time and place.
Tuma released his first album, Uncolored (Swing'n'Pop Around Rose), through the small Italian label L'amico Immaginario in 2005. Since then, he has released a few more albums on Spain’s Elefant Records, though without much commercial success. In short, Tuma is an obscure musician who releases work sporadically, yet throughout his life he has remained true to a specific musical and artistic sensibility—one I find captivating, and which leads me to reflect on the nature of creativity and fame
Tuma’s music often focuses on memories of his childhood, which appears to have been an unhappy one. In a 2016 interview, Tuma noted the following:
As a child, for different reasons, I suffered with living where my home was and is. Even though economic, social and environmental problems go on, nowadays life’s quality is improved, I can’t deny it. But frankly I must add that if I would have had the privilege of choosing, then I would have preferred to born and to live in North Europe.
As the interview progresses, one gets a sense of the frustration and sacrifices he has made to release his music:
…music takes time, money and an incredible devotion, and I can declare so far that the effort is not worth while. You can’t live only with rave reviews, alas, and for Heaven’s sake, I wouldn’t even dare thinking of “living on music” (“one over a thousand can manage it”, someone would say). I just say that the whole matter is pretty mortifying and that’s it, over.
The artistic frustration in Tuma’s life manifests in his music as a kind of melancholy, strongest perhaps in his 2016 album, This Life Denied Me Your Love. The album’s sixteen songs are reflective, the voices distant. The images they paint are of snowy days and loves gone by—the soundtrack for an evening of reflection by the fire. Listening to them, I sometimes hear echoes of my musical hero, Bill Evans—yet it still surprised me to learn that Tuma shares my admiration: “Bill Evans—I started to hear his music ten years ago; his sensitivity is one of the most important things in my life.” Within Evans’ best work flows a sadness that feels inescapable, and it sometimes seems there is no way to understand the full measure of his thoughtful improvisations through any other lens. I sense the same ebb and flow of emotion in much of Tuma’s work, especially in songs like “Oh Marc, Please Let Me Fly With My Lv” and Apples Rvlll, both from his 2011 album, In the Morning We’ll Meet.
As for the music itself, Tuma’s orchestrations and arrangements can seem almost too delicately crafted, which may be a reason for his lack of mainstream success. Speaking of This Life, Tuma noted, “My great concern wasn’t being able to have a modern sound, because today there are a lot of incredibly beautiful records with a stunning sound… The most important thing, for me today, is to concentrate each effort on the production of sound to enhance the beauty of the song.” This focus on “beauty” is found not just in his music, but also in the few videos he has created—my favorite being “Anna, My Dear,” which is below.
I especially love the star sequence that begins around the two-minute mark, which reminds me a little of the animations in The Little Prince reimagined in French New Wave. I can feel the influence of Evans and Morricone in the elegant piano chords and flowing strings that define the entire piece. We find the same care and craft in his video for “Sitting on the Little Church Steps,” in which sparse vocals and guitars float over what look like grainy home movies from the 1970s recalled through the mist of memory.
The music perfectly complement’s the song’s lyrics— the recollection of the paradox of a childhood’s momentary, and yet everlasting, pain:
Overcast Vanishing fades the sun Amber blaze Without ash fade the sun Farther stars reclaim Their time and fades the sun Numberless They sprout and fade the sun Remembering Nothing is colorfast And steaming breath dries Melting down fades the sun Numberless They sprout and fade the sun Remembering Nothing is colorfast And steaming breath dries And bruises clear up
To be sure, Tuma has his admirers. He is well regarded in a few markets and is regularly praised by musicians and critics. Writing about In the Morning, for example, the English musician Hugh Dellar noted that:
Tuma creates a dappled, multi-layered world of sound that manages to be simultaneously innocent and knowing, rapturous and reflective, nostalgic and yet utterly contemporary. There are traces of Tim Hollier’s melancholic baroque chamber pop here, hints of The High Llamas, maybe even a sniff of early Sufjan Stevens, yet the whole record is so lush and lovely and unique that a hunt for antecedents seems almost blasphemous. The 16 pieces here feel more like sketches than songs, and bleed into each other in ever-darkening hues…. The man himself has stated that his goal with this record was "to describe the concept of innocence: childhood memories, dreams, the start and finish of an important love story, the sensation of hearing Pet Sounds while sitting in a room on December the 24th with only the Christmas tree lights on.”
In his review of This Life, Giampiero Vigorito captures the work’s essence with reflections that are as emblematic as they are poignant:
The record is beautiful. We could stop here. But there is still a need to share this beauty, to transmit it because in a world of communication strategies, of successes established at the table and of pre-packaged viral idols there is yet another element that I struggle to understand. And it concerns the mysterious case of a musician who gives up on not being able to reach the heights he dreams of and of always being on the verge of withdrawing from what he feels as a competition and not as an enrichment. This is why Giorgio seems to be content with a modest fame, manageable, tailored to him, as if he were afraid of contaminating his talent or, even worse, showing its limits. Giò has listened to millions of records that have ignited his passion for music, that have refined his taste for beauty and an absolute dependence on certain spells but that have also made him feel small, incapable of scaling even the smallest of his inner peaks….With self-destructive understatement he says he is the spokesman for a music that makes no sense today.
He is “the spokesman for a music that makes no sense today”—such sad words to read. But it is a consolation to know that somewhere in Italy, there is this artist, this quiet soul, who would devote his life to such music, such beauty.
Contemplating the moment I first discovered Tuma’s music, I recall being struck by the small number of comments below each of his videos—this on a platform where almost anything can get dozens of reactions. I suppose this is the nature of artistic excellence, which sometimes finds fame, but too often does not. If I could wave a magic wand and grant Tuma the renown he deserves, I would. But alas, I cannot. All I can do is share my love of his work—and be grateful that it is there, waiting for us to discover it on any long and sleepless night.
Postscript: I forwarded the post above to Giorgio’s label, Elefant Records, along with a request for a brief interview, which Giorgio granted graciously. You can read it here:
Interview: Giorgio Tuma
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.