Gabriele Mitelli is a trumpeter and cornet player from Brescia who also plays flugelhorn and soprano saxophone and works with live electronics, voice and found objects. In the 2017 Top Jazz poll of the magazine Musica Jazz, critics named him "Nuovo Talento Italiano," the best new Italian talent, ahead of Federica Michisanti, Jacopo Ferrazza, Francesco Massaro and Roberto Negro. His Discogs page lists 23 releases, 21 of them tagged Jazz, and his own-name records have come out on Parco della Musica Records in Rome, the Portuguese label Clean Feed and the Milan-area We Insist! Records.

His biography says he began trumpet studies in 2009 with Giuseppe (Beppe) Rusconi, and his All About Jazz profile adds that he enrolled in 2010 at the Conservatorio "Luca Marenzio" in Brescia to specialize in jazz trumpet; he later worked with Markus Stockhausen in Cologne. In 2017 he also won the SIAE "Air" call for artistic residencies abroad, which took him to the conservatory in Lisbon and the Italian Cultural Institute in Portugal. Il Giorno reported in 2017 that he had been in the band of the singer-songwriter Cristina Donà for more than a year, and that the year's projects included the co-founding of Ground Music Festival, an itinerant festival, and of Indica, a collective for improvised music and its links to other arts. Since 2017 he has been president of the Brescia cultural association Lampedée, and he founded BAO (Brescia Arts Observatory), which runs a summer music festival and a winter event called BAO Sound Experience. In 2024 he was co-artistic director of Il Jazz Italiano per le terre del sisma with guitarist Francesco Diodati and Ugo Viola.

His first record as a leader was Hymnus Ad Nocturnum (Parco della Musica Records, 2014), a quartet with pianist Alfonso Santimone, bassist Giulio Corini and drummer Nelide Bandello; its seven pieces carry titles such as "Jeanne Hebuterne," "Il Giardino Di Renoir" and "Antonio Gramsci," and Vincenzo Roggero reviewed it for All About Jazz. Two years later came Water Stress (Caligola, 2016), a duo record with vibraphonist Pasquale Mirra billed as Groove & Move, recorded on August 23 and 24, 2015 at Studio Duna in Russi. Mitelli plays pocket trumpet, prepared trumpet, two flugelhorns, xylophone, percussion and voice, Discogs credits him as composer of three of the nine tracks, and the set includes Paul Motian's "The Owl Of Cranston" and Carla Bley's "Jesus Maria," according to his Bandcamp. Paul Motian has his own profile on this site. The same autumn he recorded with drummer Cristiano Calcagnile's Multikulti Ensemble for Multikulti Cherry On (Caligola, 2016), a Don Cherry repertoire project with Gabriele Evangelista on double bass, and he returned for that ensemble's The Gift Of Togetherness (2019), for which Discogs credits him as composer of two tracks.

Crash (Parco della Musica Records, 2017) is the record that brought him national attention. Recorded on August 14 and 15, 2016 at Perpetuum Mobile Studio in Nave, near Brescia, it is credited to Gabriele Mitelli O.N.G., a quartet with guitarist and keyboardist Enrico Terragnoli, baritone guitarist Gabrio Baldacci and Calcagnile. It has three long tracks, "Frequency," "Rash" and "Take Off," and Discogs tags it Contemporary Jazz, Jazz-Rock and Avant-garde Jazz. Promotional descriptions of the project name pieces that shaped him, among them Sun Ra's Lanquidity and Ornette Coleman's "Sleep Talkin'"; that is the project's own framing, not a credit on the record. The Musica Jazz disc Top Jazz 2017, sold with the January 2018 issue, includes a track titled "Frequency: Another Missarà / Tuco / Lanquidity."

Around the time of Crash he also appeared on records by other Italian improvisers. On Tiziano Tononi and Daniele Cavallanti's Nexus record Experience Nexus! (Rudi Records, 2017) he plays cornet and pocket trumpet beside Francesco Chiapperini, violinist Emanuele Parrini, bassist Silvia Bolognesi and Mirra. He is in the eight-piece Pipeline 8, whose Prayer (We Insist! Records, 2018) was recorded live at Pisa Jazz on November 27 and 28, 2016 and plays six Steve Lacy compositions and one original; the band includes Andrea Grossi on double bass, Alberto Braida on piano and Calcagnile on drums, and Mitelli plays pocket trumpet and percussion. Steve Lacy is profiled on this site. The band, without guitarist Gianmaria Aprile, is also on the Pipeline live album Ahead Of July (We Insist!, December 2025), recorded on May 19, 2024 in Cernusco sul Naviglio.

The records that define him as a leader followed. Star Splitter (Clean Feed, 2019) is a duo with the Chicago trumpeter and electronic musician Rob Mazurek, recorded at Leopolda Station in Florence during the Fabbrica Europa festival with additional recording at Nibiru Station in Milan; Mitelli plays cornet, soprano saxophone, alto flugelhorn, electronics, objects and voice, and produced it. Its four tracks are named Venus, Mercury, Mars and Uranus, and Jazzwise described it as plaintive piccolo-trumpet melodies against crackling manipulated breath. The World Behind The Skin (We Insist!, November 2019) is a solo record, four pieces recorded live at the CSAC Abbazia di Valserena in Parma on December 2, 2017, with liner notes by Mazurek and the sound artist Nicola Di Croce; Discogs tags it Avant-garde Jazz and Experimental. Kinetik (Aut Records, 2020) puts him as trumpet and electronics guest with the DST duo of bass clarinetist Alberto Collodel and double bassist Simone di Benedetto. Knots And Notes (Auand, 2021) is pianist Giancarlo Tossani's Big Monitors taking on the repertoire of William Parker, with Andrea Grillini on drums and Mitelli on piccolo trumpet and flugelhorn; it was recorded on November 26 and 27, 2019, and Discogs credits Parker as composer of four of the thirteen tracks and Tossani of most of the rest. William Parker is profiled on this site.

Three Tsuru Origami is his trio with the British rhythm section of bassist John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders. Three Tsuru Origami (We Insist!, October 2022), recorded on February 21 and 22, 2022, is a piano-less trio record about birds and migration, and the Free Jazz Collective's Guido Montegrandi praised its interplay and its balance between sound and silence, melody and noise. The follow-up, Colapesce (We Insist!, April 2025), adds the Argentine tenor saxophonist Camila Nebbia; it was recorded in May 2024 at Sala Perriera Cantieri alla Zisa in Palermo, retells the Sicilian legend of the half-man, half-fish Cola Pesce in fourteen tracks, and closes with "The Eternal Guardian (Hymn For Lelio Giannetto)." He and Mazurek returned as Star Splitter for Medea (We Insist!, May 21, 2024), two long pieces dedicated to the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and recorded over three days at LM Recording Studio in Reggio Calabria.

Two 2024 and 2025 records show the noisier side of his work. In The Room (Original Cultures, March 2024) is the debut of The Elephant, his trio with Mirra and Calcagnile, tagged Electronic and Jazz on Discogs; press coverage names Cristina Donà, Chicago's Damon Locks and Mazurek as guests. The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters (Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2025) is a quartet with alto saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, drummer Lukas König and the turntablist Mariam Rezaei, who came together during Rezaei's residency at Cafe OTO in London; Mitelli plays piccolo trumpet, electronics and voice. His own biography adds performances at the Rewire Festival in the Netherlands, Cafe OTO, Jazz Is Dead and Porgy & Bess in Vienna, and lists Mats Gustafsson, Wayne Horvitz, Jeff Parker, Ken Vandermark and Joe McPhee among his collaborators; none of those appears in his Discogs credits.

Mitelli is a free-improvisation and avant-garde trumpeter whose sound runs through effects, prepared trumpet and electronics rather than conventional bebop phrasing. His records sit on jazz labels (Clean Feed, Auand, Aut, We Insist!, Parco della Musica) and draw the Jazz tag on Discogs 21 times in 23 entries, mostly with the styles Free Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz and Free Improvisation. The two entries without it are guest spots outside the jazz world: Nicola Di Croce's Clinamen (2018, Electronic; Abstract, Field Recording) and Pleiadees (2019, Rock; Alternative Rock, Noise). In The Room and The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters carry both Electronic and Jazz tags, because his electronics are a large part of what he plays, but the frameworks are improvised-jazz ones, with saxophonists, drummers and bassists working in group interplay.

His reference points, as reviewers and he himself name them, are wide. Guido Montegrandi hears "classical free jazz" in the manner of Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman in the Three Tsuru Origami trio; the Star Splitter release on Bandcamp invokes Sun Ra; and in an interview with Il Jazz Italiano he named the synthesizer composer Suzanne Ciani and the electronic producer Oneohtrix Point Never among recent inspirations. He is also a writer of programmatic pieces, tied to Frost's poem (Star Splitter), Pasolini (Medea), Sicilian myth (Colapesce) and migratory birds (Three Tsuru Origami). His side work in singer-songwriter Cristina Donà's band and on rock-adjacent and electronic releases is a real strand of his career, but it does not change the picture: his leader records and most of his sideman work are improvised jazz.