Dear Alix would you like to introduce yourself for ANAH?
My name is Alix Tucou and I am a musician, playing the bass trombone and producing electronic music.
When did you understand that music was your life?
I started at a very early age, and it was “Love at first sight”…then I had the luck to never worry about what to do in my life, Music has always been an integral part of me and always felt it was the natural path to follow.
Do you have any person who encouraged you to follow this way?
My father and grand father always supported me to follow it.
Who is your music mentor today?
I guess for every part of your musical journey through Life , mentors tend to change with the periods. Lastly during my stay in NYC 2 persons pops up (among all the meetings with incredible musicians and artists -who either way nurture your creativity). It is Tyrone Cox (original member of Crown Heights Affair) who I played a lot with and Vince Giordano (Grammy Winner and Jazz Legend) who I worked for him and his band and is specialized in the Early Jazz Era (20’s 30’s).
What kind of research are you making with your music and what is the element that are you looking for the most?
With my own compositions, I research ways to stimulate Imagination mainly. I see Imagination as another sense of perception of reality and try to give through my compositions a kind of encouragement to the listener to use its imagination stimulated by his sense of hearing. I wish the listener to Listen deeply and not just hearing music. It is a very close conception as the one of Pauline Oliveiros who invented the current of “Deep Listening” alongside Stuart Dempster.
In your research, do you take inspiration from experience that you got in your life, or you use an emphatic way to connect your music with the others human being?
Mainly an empathic way to story tell experiences.
How much important is for you the experience that you had in Europe?
The experience in Europe totally build the roots of all my personality, artistic point of view and musical taste.
How Much important is for you the experience in New York?
In New York all those experiences in Europe have been revealed and transcended by the way of life and the new artistic experiences. I have been lucky to live there as full-time musician and it just made a mix of my past experiences and new tastes and way of seeing life.
What do you think about art? What does it mean for you?
To me Art , beyond being also a manifestation of the Culture of a society, is related to freedom of feeling, thinking and its translation into the outside world…by outside world I mean outside the artists’ subconscious.
Are you working on a new project? If yes, Can you talk about it to us?
I am finalizing the mixing of my new Album called “Portraits” which I will be releasing on 8th June 2021.With this second album, I present myself as a painter capable of painting musical portraits.
This modus operandi places the figure of the musician in close relationship with the figure of a visual artist who does not use colors and canvases but a bass trombone and soundscapes.
I adopt the same compositional language as my first album “Technology and Bones” thus continuing my research started in 2015, shortly before my move to New York.
In “Portraits”, the focus is no longer on the relationship between sound and obsolete technologies but on a work of sound collages that intend to tell the personality of an individual or the essence of an object. And for this I asked few dear friends to make some featuring on some tracks, and that’s one of the most exciting part!
“Portraits” to me is a Musical Catalog of an Imaginary Contemporary Art Exhibition, as if the listener attended an exhibition and the only way to remember it would be to listen the album and not just hearing it.
I am doing a crowdfunding campaign till the 24th March 2021 to help me to release and promote it, if you wanna share or participate just check this link:
When did you decide to connect music with visual art?
It has been in fact a very natural process in my artistic development. Coming from a family of musicians and painters, the two worlds have always been kind of connected together, but it is recently that the 2 connected in my research, especially with the meeting of my fabulous wife who is an incredible Art Curator and Art critic. It is at her contact that the connections bloomed as much as our Love, it goes all together and is a part of something way bigger than us.
Who is your favorite visual artist?
I can not choose only one person…I would say Lucio Fontana, Claude Cezanne, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jackson Pollock, the Fauvism movement, Paul Gauguin, Jean Michel Basquiat,The Italian Poveristi, Bernini, Caravaggio and many more…
What advise you would give to the new generation of musicians?
Try to understand who you are and try to translate it the best you can with your sound.
As Miles Davis said: “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself ”.
What items do you use the most between heart and mind when you compose your music?
Heart goes first, but tend to be a often overdoing things…that’s where the mind comes into play to kind of tiding up things!
In one word: What is music for you?
Life.
By Carla Ricevuto
Alix Tucou’s Contacts:
Website https://atucou.wixsite.com/music?lang=it
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/alix.tucou
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/alixtucou/