Giacomo Tantillo is a Sicilian trumpeter, composer and teacher. His biography gives his birth as March 14, 1986 in Palermo; the town of Bagheria, near Palermo, claims him as a local musician, and he began studying music in March 1999, at 13, with Maestro Antemillo Galluzzo. He took a classical trumpet degree with honors in June 2006, followed by a teaching-qualification degree, and in June 2014 finished the second-level jazz trumpet degree at Palermo's Conservatorio Vincenzo Bellini with 110 cum laude and honorable mention. He then studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. His biography lists Sean Jones, Darren Barrett, Charles Tolliver, Ambrose Akinmusire, Barry Harris and Flavio Boltro among the teachers of the advanced courses he took. Berklee's Jazz Revelation Records label included him on the 2015 student compilation Transitions, where Discogs credits him as a featured player on "One For CT."

Before Berklee, competitions established him. He won first place at the "Pippo Ardini" national jazz competition in 2011 and the "Benedetto Albanese" national competition in 2013, and in 2012 he and alto saxophonist Francesco Patti shared first place at the XVI Premio Internazionale Massimo Urbani for jazz soloists, with Tantillo also taking the audience prize. The Tantillo / Patti Quintet recorded Rewind (Musicamdo Jazz Record, 2013) as the prize's follow-up, with pianist Seby Burgio, bassist Giuseppe Cucchiara and drummer Stefano Bagnoli, and the liner notes were written by Enrico Rava. In 2015 he received the Vittoria Rotary Jazz Award for emerging talent.

His own group's first full statement came with Water Trumpet (self-released, December 2018), a quartet album with pianist Andrea Rea, bassist Matteo Bortone and drummer Enrico Morello. The title comes from a piece born when water got into the horn and changed its sound. The repertoire includes his own themes and two compositions by Woody Shaw, "Stepping Stone" and "In Case You Haven't Heard." According to his own site, the saxophonist George Garzone wrote the liner notes and compared his sound to Shaw's progressive approach. The album led to a 2019 win in the "Nuova Generazione Jazz" call backed by the Italian Ministry of Culture, I-Jazz and SIAE, and to a set at the Toronto Jazz Festival on June 25, 2019, on the OLG Stage with bassist Matteo Bortone and drummer Paolo Vicari. His biography adds that Musica Jazz named him best new Italian talent in its Top Ten poll of January 2020.

Bandistikamente (self-released, 2023) took him somewhere else. Credited to Giacomo Tantillo with Roy Paci, Vito Scavo and Antonio Putzu, and recorded with his band The Zisas, it recasts Sicilian and southern Italian brass-band repertoire with funk, reggae and Latin-jazz rhythms. Paci produced and arranged it and plays trumpet, and the pianist Fabio Giachino is on piano and keyboards. It opens with a funk reworking of the march "The King."

Alongside his own projects he plays in ensembles. His biography lists him as a stable member of the Orchestra Nazionale Jazz Giovani Talenti, the national young-talents jazz orchestra directed by Paolo Damiani, since June 2014, and Discogs credits him on trumpet on the orchestra's double album Oscene Rivolte (2019) alongside fellow trumpeter Francesco Fratini and singer Camilla Battaglia. Damiani also used him on trumpet and flugelhorn for Classiche Musiche Leggere (Casa del Jazz, 2016). He is credited in the trumpet section of Norma (2019), Bellini's opera arranged for the Orchestra Jazz del Mediterraneo with Paolo Fresu as featured soloist. His biography also names him as second trumpet and soloist of the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana of the Brass Group in Palermo since 2018, the orchestra in which Francesco Marchese is first tenor; no recording credit shared between the two is documented.

He teaches trumpet and jazz trumpet at the AFAM (higher-education) level at the Conservatorio Toscanini in Ribera, in the province of Agrigento, and at a comprehensive school in Partinico. He is an official Yamaha artist. His biography credits him with performances across North America, Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, Israel, Belgium, France and Malta, film and documentary work including Michael Radford's Elsa & Fred (2013) and the Rai5 documentary I ragazzi del jazz, and collaborations with musicians including Danilo Rea, Stefano Di Battista, Rita Marcotulli and Flavio Boltro, and, in his words, Italian pop and rock artists. Recent activity includes Radio Italia Live under conductor Bruno Santori and a trumpet and accordion duo, Dual Flow, with accordionist Roberto Gervasi, scheduled for September 26, 2026 at the Centro Culturale Michele Abbate in Caltanissetta to close the second "Cuore Siciliano, Battito Jazz" festival.

Tantillo's core language is mainstream modern trumpet, post-bop and hard bop in the line of Woody Shaw, whose tunes he recorded on Water Trumpet and to whom George Garzone compared him. Berklee faculty quoted on his own site describe him as a mature, versatile trumpeter comfortable in bebop and more experimental settings, with a big range and reading skill. The two Discogs-listed albums under his name show the spread: Water Trumpet is acoustic quartet post-bop, while Bandistikamente is a party-band record that treats the Italian wind-band tradition as raw material for jazz-funk and Latin grooves, tagged on Discogs across Jazz, Latin, Funk / Soul and Folk. His sideman credits reach into orchestral jazz, contemporary composition, a Christmas vocal record, and a house EP, and he also appears on two Classical-labeled albums of the Palermo accordionist Ruggiero Mascellino, but every leader project and the bulk of the credits are jazz.