Gabriele Mitelli (Brescia, 1988) is a musician, composer and performer. He works in experimental music and avant-garde jazz. His main instrument is the trumpet, but he plays many wind instruments and modular synthesizers as well. He has created sound installations and site-specific performances.
“Young trumpet player Gabriele Mitelli brings a doncherryesque quality to the projects he is involved in, but his expressiveness is undoubtedly a twenty-first century’s one. (he has) the potential to bring a whole new audience to the genre.” (Enrico Bettinello)
Watch and listen to him solo
Watch him in an art installation
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
Mariam Rezaei (turntables),
Mette Rasmussen (alto sax),
Gabriele Mitelli (piccolo trumpet, electronics),
Lukas Koenig (drums)
Forged in the crucible of turntablist Mariam Rezaei’s November 2023 residency at London’s Café Oto, The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters is an incendiary new quartet featuring Mette Rasmussen on alto saxophone, Gabriele Mitelli on piccolo trumpet and electronics, and Lukas Koenig on drums. Their punk approach to free improvisation draws on elements of jazz, noise, hip-hop, techno and new music to create a thrilling sonic maelstrom that is beyond category or convention.
As Rezaei scratches diverse samples – Iranian vocoder melodies, doom guitar riffs, wailing saxophones, torrential drums – into ecstatic new forms, Mitelli blows a wild trumpet, wrangles his noise boxes and hollers cosmic chants. Rasmussen plays with her characteristic blend of ferocity and precision, jousting with Rezaei and Mitelli while surfing Koenig’s waves of breakbeats, heavy metal thunder and free jazz abstraction. It’s a thrilling example of where experimental music is at right now, as creative musicians from diverse backgrounds build a world beyond genre.
Horn and sax play scraps of melodies as the bass pounds like an alarm going off, at one point evoking one of those Ivesian country fair jazz bands blown up with postmodern humour and craziness, and a thick dark electronic sound from the turntables. Chugging industrial rhythms make you wanna pick up your feet for the four to the floor but it suddenly spasms back to glitchy dysrhythmia.
They’re a monster party band with a sense of total having it, a raucous and rapacious bricolage of jazz history and arty ideas in a mad bundle of vital chaotic energy. (AJ Dehany, London Jazz News)
TSORPM has the punk elegance of free improvisation and dismantles jazz, noise, hip-hop, techno and new music to create its own sonic maelstrom. Paritarian and organic, as we said. Literate and referential, too. This quartet takes its name from an engraving by Francisco de Goya, whose title is sadly a sign of our modern times. (Guillaume Malvoisin, Novo)
The Elephant
Gabriele Mitelli – piccolo trumpet, voice, electronics
Pasquale Mirra – vibraphone, voice, electronics
Cristiano Calcagnile – drums, percussion, voice
Listen to the latest record In The Room (2024, Origian Cultures – also available on Spotify and other platforms) and watch and watch
The Elephant is an Italian trio, founded in 2017, composed of longstanding members of the Italian jazz community with numerous collaborations and contributions to their names. The trio first came together for an artistic residency at the Ground Music Festival (Brescia) with the filmmaker collective Unzalab where they collaborated on “Ver” a live performance of expanded cinema during which musicians and filmmakers dialogued and improvised to lead the audience on a journey through space in search of fantastic new worlds. That same year, the Elephant participated in the Venice Biennale, within the French Pavilion as part of the opera set up by Xavier Veilhan (thanks to Enrico Bettinello). The pavilion had been transformed into a large sound box in which the band played for three days using a multitude of acoustic instruments and synthesisers. Since then, the Elephant has continued to perform across Italy as a trio alongside friends from the global jazz community such as Rob Mazurek, Jeff Parker, Alexander Hawkins, Danilo Gallo, Chad Taylor and many others.
In 2024 they finally decided to sit down and record some of the magic they’d been capturing in their exploration into the frontiers of jazz. So they locked themselves in a room and dealt with the proverbial elephant.
Across its eight tracks the album offers explorations of the intimate personal and musical relationships between these three friends, each expressing themselves via their instrument — trumpet, vibraphone, drums as well as electronics and voice — resulting in an intimate collection of musical polaroids that reflect the expressiveness and potentiality of the music they love. The trio are joined by three guests from their global community — Italy’s Cristina Donà and Chicago’s Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek — who each lend their voice and poetic writing to the trio’s compositions.
(the Elephant) have offered a spectacular and explosive set, cracking music built on a structured percussion floor full of color, powered by generous inserts of electronica, voices and trumpet. A balanced sonic cocktail that has charted mesmerizing trajectories, a game of sonic interference and experimental forays naturally inserted into the melodic and rhythmic context, giving us a perfect snapshot of the expressiveness and potential of contemporary jazz… (James Cook)
(the Elephant) deliver a dense, gripping, multi-layered, wonderfully grooving, hour-long concert full of interlocking sound ideas. Catchy structures combined with sound experiments always work coherently and convincingly with this band. (Christoph Giese, JazzWise)
Ever intriguing and complex, the multitudes of layers and ideas all combined into a harmonious and tight album is a work of wonder. The jazzy delight that is In The Room is the perfect introduction for the powerhouse trio that is The Elephant. (Neil P. Gregorio)
the proverbial elephant has many inspired, poetic qualities. (Eyal Hareuveni, Salt Peanuts)
Three Tsuru Origami
Gabriele Mitelli – cornet, soprano sax, voice, percussion
John Edwards – double bass
Mark Sanders – drums
Gabriele Mitelli’s European trio has a clear mission statement: to distance itself from cliché, and to take the path less travelled. The music is a journey to the heart of improvisation, where jazz is once again a gamble – an edgy practice where risk-taking is central to progress. Mitelli’s bandmates are two great English musicians, for whom noise and revolt are a way of life: bassist John Edwards, and drummer Mark Sanders. All three are tireless experimenters, who have played in various combinations alongside the likes of Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Sunny Murray, Peter Brötzmann, Louis Moholo-Moholo, and Wadada Leo Smith: collaborations which speak of courage and freedom, integrity, and commitment. Brace yourselves: there is a whole world to discover here.
Star Splitter
Gabriele Mitelli – piccolo trumpet, modular synthesizer, sampler, voice
Rob Mazurek – piccolo trumpet, sampler, voice
Facing each other. No filters, no mediations. Through mirrors and mutual recalls, constantly walking the tightrope. Rob Mazurek and Gabriele Mitelli: trumpeters who are not just trumpeters, musicians who made the ‘beyond’ and the ‘elsewhere’ their way of life. Mazurek, a revered master. At the heart of the Chicago scene for almost two decades now, catalyst of energies, tireless experimenter and focal point between the dancing legacy of Sun Ra and the uncompromising impulses of the most non-aligned (post-)rock, between the lesson of Bill Dixon and the majestic path of the AACM generation. Mitelli, young and wayward, instinctive and courageous in rushing headlong into the less comfortable situations and the most unlikely contexts. They had to meet one day. It’s about affinity and consonance. A matter of life. A matter of music.
“The duo’s playing was raw, uninhibited and real. Their sonic cornucopia, wild and free, is one of the most exciting and convincing meldings of electronic and acoustic forces I’ve heard” (Andy Hamilton)
(…) the pair function like hall of mirror refractions of one another across a single work. The duo juggle trumpets, electronics, and raw vocalizing in a shapeshifting sound quilt that veers from spacious deliberation to densely raucous rapture. Despite the shared instrumentation, the musicians blend disparate aesthetic tendencies, sometimes coalescing but more often generationg a visceral fraction through differences that push and pull. (Peter Margasak, The Wire)
An intense and timeless work that captivates and grips. (Franpi Barriaux, Citizen Jazz)
duo now effectively established, but always evolving, in which electronics have taken on even more prominence, with a full-bodied, vitalistic, free, noisy and also enjoyably playful use. (Marcello Lorrai, Il Manifesto)
Listen , watch promo and watch concert
Please see Mitelli’s website for all his projects.