It took me many years of discipline, sacrifice and hard work to come close to the skill I wanted. Of course, it’s a road that has no end, improvement never stops, says Garo Tavitjan, our established instrumentalist who is known to the public, first of all, as a drummer. He was recently selected as one of the 500 most influential drummers in the world by Drummerworld, the world’s largest drumming community and company, which, according to Garro, is probably his greatest achievement. This is the first time that an artist from these areas entered the world list with the most influential musicians in the history of world music.

Although he grew up in the shadow of his father Garabet Tavitjan, otherwise our musical legend, drummer of “Leb I Sol”, Garo managed to pave his way in the music world with his individual creativity, perseverance and drive to work and progress.

Garo has appeared on 100 albums, has 3 solo projects with his brother Diran, who is also an established musical name, and as the “Tavitjan Brothers” they released a compilation of 170 concerts they played all over the world, i.e. 10 CDs, something that is compiled from various concert recordings and material that took two years to produce to reach release level.

– My first performance was in a public class at MBUC, and I remember the first time I performed at a jazz-rock concert at the age of 11, for 2 songs with my father at the Military Pool in Skopje, and I think Gish performed, and then some groups followed that I had with friends. One was at the beginning with Damjan Temkov, then with Dragan Trajkovski Fis, with whom I played in the seventh grade, etc. Garo recalls.

As for his favorite performances so far, Garo struggled to single out a few due to the fact that he has such a rich concert oeuvre.

– It’s hard to give a short answer, but probably one of my favorite concerts is at “Carnegie Hall”, which is considered the most renowned concert hall in the world, and is located in the center of New York, near Times Square, and our concert was sold out for 2 days. Then the concerts at the world-renowned Blue Note, also in New York. My brother and I have performed all over Europe and the entire Balkans, from “Exit” to “Sava Center”, our Skopje stadium where we had guests from the most renowned Balkan singers, including an audience of 70,000… – Garo singles out some of the performances that he have marked the career so far.

At his father’s rehearsals, he got acquainted with the process called playing

Garo is a fourth generation resident of Skopje and his Tavitjan family belongs to the 10th oldest Skopje families. He points to his father Garabet Tavitjan as the founder of Macedonian contemporary music, including rock and jazz culture, whose beginnings and greatest achievements he is, and is one of the most significant drumming and music legends in the Balkans.

– I visited rehearsals where my father worked on his projects, and it was mostly with his group “Garo and Paramecium”, with which he worked daily. The earliest I remember is a rehearsal space in GTC where they practiced with “Leb I Sol”, but later he continued in that space by himself. For several years, my brother and I were present at those rehearsals when he started his group. In all these places I got acquainted with the process called playing and normally with the instruments and the piano we had at home. I was enrolled in the elementary MBUC at the age of 5 and a half, so piano and drums were my everyday instruments. I studied for 7 years of elementary music education where I played the piano, and later I enrolled in percussion instruments and continued with secondary music education in the percussion section, but the piano was my secondary instrument and I practiced both at the same time to a great extent – says Garo.

He divided the exercise into two stages of two hours each

In high school, Garo devoted himself to the drums with full steam, and he says that it took him many years of discipline, sacrifice and hard work to come close to the desired skill.

– I divided the practice into several stages in the day due to certain methods that I discovered as an approach to the instrument. The stages lasted 2 hours non-stop, where I dedicated myself to each limb separately with certain exercises and later practiced the overall performance together with all the components and rudimentary exercises. The process is divided into work on technical necessities, dynamics, development of phrases, practicing with a metronome (in different tempos), separation in various metrics and tempo (independence of limbs), reading notation, playing transcriptions, creating own improvisations, practicing various styles from different eras, mirroring phrases from our idols, fitness exercises on drums in the sense of practicing everything that is not practiced and is demanding at the moment of development, and then to practice and try it all with a group – explains Garo.

Garo planned to continue at FMU in Skopje, but at the last moment he gave up because of his desire to go to America. He and his brother received a scholarship to Berklee in Boston, and were later accepted to the German Jazz Conservatory. At the first school he studied part-time and online, and at the second he stayed in Germany for a certain period. He then graduated from a business and management school, which he studied part-time and took classes online because he was very busy with concerts, traveling and making music.

– I was a part-time student because my career started immediately with concerts and recording albums. I was generally busy with my studio and the production that we opened with my brother, but mostly with practice and concerts. I started with concerts very young, at the age of 12, and in high school I went to concerts very often, and then on long tours, so that at the age of 19 I already had about 50 concerts behind me, and in the following period the number of three-digit performances, up to over 1,000 performances to date… Maybe even more, because everywhere we could we visited and performed concerts – adds Garo.

“Music is not a competition of achievements, but a proof that anything can be produced from sound”

Garo hasn’t lost his work ethic when it comes to practicing and improving the instrument. He practices constantly and the preparations for the concerts must be constant in his everyday life, which means that only the material changes, so depending on the material, they spend so much time with his brother when they have concerts like “Tavitjan Brothers”.

– The stage is a magical place where you give something of yourself that can never be repeated. The actual exercise is inside me, thinking about new expressions and directions, and I need a certain break to open up a new level of thinking and isolation from previous expressions, concerts or rehearsals. Just as an actor gets used to a new role and needs time to capture it, so a musician requires his own time which can last for years before he manifests in a certain way that he desires. It just comes to that challenging stage where they already recognize your identity and the story you tell as a performer and author, so you need to be honest, first of all, for your own sake – explains Garo.

Music is not a competition of achievements, but a proof that anything can be produced from sound, rhythm, harmony and imagination, which should serve to inspire other people to have its own meaning and purpose, says Garo.

– To be able to understand this, I had to spend many concerts in many places and different countries that do not have a similar culture. Live performances are a very beautiful experience and you have to feel the spotlight and the silence of the stage to understand the emotion that the music offers, which is an irreplaceable feeling. At one point I understood that I miss recording a good album and learning production to capture my own idea and I realized that it is also very inspiring and offers an unprecedented opportunity to realize the imagination. That need to create music was born within me when I listened to albums on which world authors have worked for a long time and then I understood that in order to make a good record that someone will listen to many times, you need to give a lot of wisdom and high aesthetics – concludes Garo.

Prepared by: Nikola Petrovski