Tommaso Gambini
Recording Engineer and Musician
Profile
An accomplished and versatile professional in the world of music, Tommaso Gambini is renowned for his expertise as a recording engineer, guitarist, and composer.
Gambini worked for three years at the legendary Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs (New Jersey) — now a National Landmark, and by many considered the most important recording studio in the history of Jazz. Here, he collaborated with notable musicians from the Jazz and creative music scenes, such as Charles McPherson, Alexander Claffy, Dayna Stephens, Micah Thomas, Joey De Francesco and Bill Stewart. He also played a crucial role in the first-ever live concert broadcast from Van Gelder Studio, in collaboration with Sonos, that featured Grammy-winners Ron Carter and Joe Lovano.
As an independent engineer, besides his studio work, Gambini specializes in on-location recording. He believes that oftentimes live performances surpass the studio in energy and spontaneousness, and aims at conveying such qualities in a recorded format, with clarity and fidelity. His work on Aaron Seeber’s quintet live at the Ornithology Jazz Club in Brooklyn (New York) resulted in the highly acclaimed release First Move.
In addition to his engineering skills, Gambini is a proficient guitarist and composer. He has shared the stage with Grammy-winning luminaries such as Antonio Sanchez, Danilo Perez, and Terri Lyne Carrington. His debut album, The Machine Stops, featured him as a composer, guitarist, producer and mixer, and was received to critical acclaim. His efforts as a film composer for the independent short In Between Seconds resulted in several awards and nominations (Best Music at the WideScreen Film Festival, etc).
Gambini holds a Bachelor Of Music from Berklee College Of Music in Performance and Film Scoring, and a Master Of Science from Politecnico Di Milano in Music And Acoustic Engineering (where he studied Acoustics and Digital Signal Processing). He is a member of the Audio Engineering Society (that invited him to be a panelist at the AES Convention in 2019 about the work of Rudy Van Gelder), and a member of SESAC.
Equipment and preferred gear
Gambini owns and uses German microphones from Neumann, Schoeps, Beyerdynamic, and Microtech Gefell. He also likes microphones from Audio Technica. He uses a Nagra IVS tape recorder for live‐to‐two‐track recordings.
Selected (recent) engineering discography
Paride Pignotti — Roots
Steve Carrington — Friends R Family
Aaron Seeber — First Move
Billy Drummond — Valse Sinistre
Adam Shulman — Just the Contrafacts
Michael Weiss — Persistance
Grant Stewart — The Lightning Of The Lamps
Brian Charette — Jackpot
Clemens Grassman — Grass Machine
Jesse Simpson — Bar Bayeux Beginnings
Isaiah Collier — Cosmic Transitions
Alexander Claffy — Michael Stephenson Meets The Alexander Claffy Trio
Sam Zerna — The Decider
Charles McPherson — Jazz Dance Suites
Black Art Jazz Collective — Ascension
Tommaso Gambini — The Machine Stops
Links
The Machine Stops
Profile on All About Jazz
Interview on Musica Jazz
Website about the legacy of Rudy Van Gelder
Contact
Send an email to info@tommasogambini.com