Gillespi & Álvaro Torres: Expanding Forms

Some artistic partnerships endure like an ongoing conversation. For more than two decades, Gillespi and Álvaro Torres have built a creative bond that continues to evolve with every new endeavor. This Friday, they arrive at Artlab with a performance that reflects both their artistic maturity and their shared desire to keep venturing into new sonic territory.

You can find the tickets here.

Born in Buenos Aires—a city shaped by jazz, tango and rock—Gillespi is best known as a trumpeter, but he is also a guitarist, bassist, and radio host. Throughout his career, he has embraced constant experimentation, moving freely between tradition and innovation while incorporating a wide range of instruments and textures into his work.

From La Plata, Álvaro Torres found his creative home at the piano. His classical training coexists with an enduring curiosity that has led him to embrace synthesizers, digital textures, and contemporary compositional tools. His music brings together the language of jazz, improvisation, and modern technology in a voice that is distinctly his own.

Together, they have performed at festivals and concert halls with a shared goal: expanding the possibilities of the duo format. Their musical partnership began more than twenty years ago, when Torres joined Gillespi’s regular band as pianist and keyboardist. Since then, they have shared hundreds of performances, developing a deep artistic connection that eventually inspired them to compose an album as true co-authors. They describe the creative process behind FORMA as a kind of “handcrafted laboratory”: experimenting with ideas, recording one layer at a time, realizing that a piece still needed “one little guitar,” and gradually building each composition from the ground up. Rather than bringing additional musicians into the studio, they chose to perform almost every instrument themselves, transforming the concept of a duo into a self-contained miniature orchestra.

On their latest album, FORMA, they took full responsibility for every aspect of the recording, creating what they call an “expanded duo,” where piano, trumpet, guitars, synthesizers and electronic textures coexist within a distinctive sonic architecture. The album features seven original compositions alongside a reinterpretation of a Luis Alberto Spinetta classic, paying tribute to one of Argentina’s most influential musical voices. But live, the proposal expands even further: the group appears as a quintet alongside Leo Tegli (electric guitar), Andrés Pellican (electric bass), and Tomás Babjaczuk (drums), forming an ensemble that enhances collective energy and opens new sonic dimensions.

Released by the label Club del Disco, the project extends this journey beyond local borders, circulating in different countries with a body of work that engages with the contemporary music scene, where influences coexist naturally and aesthetic boundaries are increasingly permeable.

Rather than defining themselves through a single genre, Gillespi and Torres have developed a language of their own. Their work is the result of a creative friendship sustained by curiosity and a constant desire to explore new sonic possibilities. With its spirit as a cultural laboratory, Artlab provides the ideal setting to experience and celebrate that shared pursuit.