Educated as a classical musician, Giacomo Grassi has later expanded his aesthetics from jazz to electroacoustics.
He has performed in UK, where he studied at the Farnham College - Surrey; in Palestine/Israel – Jerusalem and Ramallah, at the Franco-German Cultural Centre; in France with Sin[x]thesis at the Festival International de Musique Universitaire (FIMU) of Belfort; in Germany, where his composition Geographies was chosen for the concert of the First International C-Sound Conference, in October 2011 at the HMTMH of Hanover. An interview, about the ideation and the process of composing, can be found in: "Ways ahead - Proceedings of the First Csound Conference"; Eds. J.Heintz, A.Hofmann, I.McCurdy; Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2013.
In the Progetto Guaccero of 2011, Giacomo Grassi conducted his Apres la côte, blanc for jazz orchestra and electronics in Monopoli. He wrote the electronic music for William Shakespeare's The Tempest, directed by Craig Peritz on May-June 2011 at the Eutheca Theatre in Rome. His electroacoustic compositions can be listened to on sonus.ca
Born in Italy in 1984, Giacomo Grassi started to study the Piano at the age of 6 and graduated in 2004.
He then specialized in Interpretative & Compositional studies at the Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali Giovanni Paisiello of Taranto; in Jazz, cum laude, at the Conservatorio Nino Rota of Monopoli; and in Electroacoustics at the Conservatorio Niccolò Piccinni of Bari.
Giacomo Grassi graduated in Philosophy, cum laude, at the Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro with the thesis in philosophical hermeneutics La vaghezza fertile dell’archiscrittura. Jacques Derrida published by LibriSenzaCarta.
A x i o m a t a is the title of a series of piano solo concerts by Giacomo Grassi, in the 2014 -15 season.
In his compositional and improvisational doing, Giacomo Grassi deconstructs the musical mathematics entities of his world. He creates languages by formulating other sonic and psychical geometries, traced or drawn on different and motile surfaces. Thus the necessity of new axioms (what is self-evident in phenomenological terms) and postulates, as starting points of his Ricercare.
The sonorities and timbres, as well as his harmonics choices and the attention to the forms, constitute the focal points of the searching flux (Ricercare). The pianist cast, shape or defibre his own compositions and quotations from the jazz repertoire, in discontinuous emersion from a total improvisation which opens to other visions. In the sound and textures of Giacomo Grassi, it can also be noticed the influence of his electroacoustics composing.
Among the composers who mainly inspired him in the research of his own pianistic aesthetics, there are: Giacinto Scelsi, Cecil Taylor, Mal Waldron, Dmitrij Šostakovič.