Vito Schiuma

Piano. Vocals. Contemporary Blues.

As I like to say—you are the first chord you strike when you sit on the bench and start to play. I started playing when I was 8, in a small Italian town where all you could learn was classical music—there were no pop-jazz-you-name-it schools yet. My father played at home, but what fascinated me most was watching the marching bands parade for funerals through town. When they passed, everyone had to wait.

I dreamed of playing the trumpet—free to carry my instrument wherever I felt like it. Instead my father brought me to the local music school, where I started out on piano. This isn't a story of easy success: financial turmoil and a local culture that valued tradition over real pedagogy turned a natural inclination into something that simply had to be endured, all the way to a local conservatory.

My direction was classical music through the end of the Conservatory, with a few detours into ragtime—yet my first public performance was a blues piano piece. Amid all that rigid structure, blues felt like a door left open, and I walked through it without fully knowing where it led.

Years later, that door took me to New York and New Orleans, two cities that taught me more about music in months than years of solfège ever could. In New York I learned that jazz isn't a genre you study, it's a language you live in. New Orleans was warmer, looser, but no less demanding—music there isn't a performance, it's a conversation that never really stops.

Then, almost by accident, researching my family's history, I discovered ancestors who had emigrated to Argentina and become part of its musical fabric. The pull I'd always felt toward improvisation, toward music as something shared and not owned, turned out to be inherited.

Piano. Vocals. Contemporary Blues. Three words that today carry New York's nights, New Orleans's streets, a small Italian town's marching bands—and a piece of Argentina I didn't know was mine until I went looking for it.