The Great Instagram Jazz Guitar Plagiarism Scandal

In one video, the guitarist looks like he bought all his clothes from Instagram ads: rust-colored slacks, camp shirt with vaguely tropical pattern, backwards dad cap. The smartphone-vertical frame pans languidly across the group of musicians that surround him, all outfitted similarly in millennial leisure wear. They’re bopping, smiling, having a great time playing an instrumental version of a Stevie Wonder song. Even the guitar, a dusky blue Telecaster lookalike with a raspberry-red pickguard, is moodboard-ready. You could imagine it hanging on the wall in a boutique hotel in L.A. or Austin or Nashville, the kind of place with a killer mezcal margarita named after a dead songwriter at the lobby bar. The guy playing it might look like a startup sales bro at happy hour, but you’ve gotta admit: He’s fucking shredding. 

In the other video, the guitarist looks… not unfashionable or anything, just more like you might expect a guy who uploads YouTube videos of himself shredding to look: dark jeans, black T-shirt, long hair pulled tightly back. He’s playing a semi-hollow Yamaha, classy-looking in a muted sort of way. It’s hard to imagine he chose the outfit or the guitar for the way they would pop on camera. The lighting is dim, the focus is a little blurry. The frame is horizontal, even though it was uploaded to YouTube’s vertically oriented Shorts section, so much of the screen space is taken up by letterboxing. This guy’s presentation may be humbler, but he, too, is fucking shredding. Shredding to the same Stevie Wonder song, in fact, though he’s labeled the video with the artist name of a British acid-jazz group who once covered it. Another less-than-savvy choice, perhaps: There are surely lots more people searching for Stevie Wonder guitar videos than Incognito ones. 

Upon closer examination, these two guys aren’t just playing along to the same song. They’re playing exactly the same solo: the same staccato chordal stab that opens it, the same call-and-response licks that follow that, even the same little self-satisfied nod and smile during a particularly sassy bend in the middle. Marco Baldi, an Italian jazz guitarist with about 5,000 Instagram followers, uploaded his version in 2022. Giacomo Turra, an Italian jazz guitarist with about 725,000, uploaded his a year later. 

Turra is far from a celebrity, but until recently, he seemed to be making a real career for himself as a guitarist. He’d parlayed his apparently virtuosic musicianship and canny eye for Instagram aesthetics into a signature guitar from D’Angelico, whose other artists include members of Steely Dan and the Grateful Dead. He toured 500-capacity venues in Europe and the U.S. His most popular Instagram videos have hundreds of thousands of likes. (Video views are hidden on his profile, but it’s probably safe to assume based on industry rules of thumb that they are in the millions or more.) Then, in April, a bass-playing YouTuber named Danny Sapko published a video outlining several cases like the one above, in which Turra seemed to be ripping off solos from other less-acclaimed musicians. To be fair, many of his posts included some form of credit: In a caption on the Stevie Wonder clip that links to Baldi’s Instagram page but not the specific video, Baldi is credited with “arrangement”—which is something, but probably would not suggest to most viewers that Turra is in fact copying Baldi’s solo note-for-note. Amid the endless scroll of Instagram Reels, a viewer would have to be especially curious to locate the original and find out for themselves. 

Another guitarist, Jack Gardiner, later said in an interview with Guitar World that he received similarly vague credit for Turra’s use of his solo only after contacting him and threatening legal action. One way that guitarists in this space make money is by selling tablature, or tabs—a simplified, guitar-centric form of sheet music—of their solos, so that interested viewers can learn how to play them. Gardiner was especially galled to find that Turra was selling tabs of the solo he’d copied, despite the fact that Gardiner was also selling them through his own channel. Sapko’s video included multiple other examples of Turra using the same ploy. 

More videos from Sapko and other YouTubers, with more examples of apparent copying, quickly followed. One of Turra’s singles as a recording artist—not just an Instagram post—seemed to be based on a jam someone else had posted to YouTube. People began to wonder aloud if Turra was really even playing what you hear in his videos, or just miming along to heavily cleaned up pre-recorded audio. Anthony Fantano made a video about it, as did the mega-popular musician-centric YouTuber Rick Beato, who said that he’d invited Turra to record a collaborative video at his studio but elected not to upload it when it became clear that the guitarist wasn’t playing up to the virtuosic level advertised by his Instagram clips. D’Angelico stopped selling Turra’s signature guitar. Turra took his personal website offline, uploaded an apology of sorts to YouTube, then pulled down the apology along with his entire YouTube channel. His Instagram account is still live, but comments are locked. The only new post in the two months since the micro-scandal began is a video highlight reel, uploaded last week, of Turra playing in concert. There’s no caption, but it’s clearly intended to demonstrate that he still has chops, even without fancy editing software to help him. 

I won’t attempt to exhaustively catalog each of Turra’s alleged offenses against music. If you’re interested, it is possible to spend several hours in the wormhole of content that follows in the recommendations after watching Sapko’s original video, a much more thorough discussion than I could manage here. My favorite is this loopy reaction video from classical guitarist Cameron Fernandez, who jokes that Turra might have simply gotten himself into the wrong genre. The classical tradition, he points out, is built almost entirely on highly skilled players performing pristine renditions of music composed by other people; in jazz, you’re expected to improvise your own parts. 

Though Turra doesn’t often play straight jazz—“The Great Instagram Jazz/Pop/Funk Fusion Plagiarism Scandal” may have been a more accurate headline—his rise and fall seems to me like a distinct product of jazz’s complicated relationship with social media, which I’ve written some about at Pitchfork before. Learning and faithfully reproducing other people’s solos is a crucial part of the tradition, but it’s something you’re expected to do in private, as a way of educating yourself about how a player more skilled than you might navigate a particular tune. You pick up a couple tricks from your elders—a rhythmic fragment here, an unexpected chromatic run there—and work them into your own vocabulary. Over time, you assimilate them, combining them with ideas from other musicians you’ve studied, including some who play other instruments, other genres; you study drummers, clarinetists, rappers, singers, food cart vendors making their strangely melodious pitches for roasted nuts; you listen to your friends playing, but wish they’d play it just a little differently; you draw from your own history, a piercing interval in a childhood favorite song, the sweetly understated way that your mother used to sing you to sleep, and so on, until eventually you get onstage and sound like yourself rather than a bad imitation of Charlie Parker. 

There is an immense amount of practice involved in finding your own voice. I am not a jazz musician, but from time to time I will spend an evening or two learning a solo, or transcribing an R&B singer’s vocal embellishments, analyzing the way their note choices interact with the rhythm and chords. Sometimes, I post footage of my practice to social media. Lots of musicians do the same. In music, as in other creative fields, a steady stream of content is helpful for keeping your name out there and showing what you can do. Someone might see a clip on Instagram and hire you to play in their band, or sign up for your fledgling business as a guitar teacher, or make a mental note to come see you the next time you play. Or they might just slap a like on it and give you a little bit of validation that someone out there is listening. With the pressure to produce content so high—especially on those who are trying to make a living from their playing—and the hours and hours many musicians already spend shedding other people’s material, it’s not a huge surprise that people would post these practice sessions for public consumption.

Most musicians who use social media this way are not trying to pass off their studies as original creative work. But I can imagine how Turra might have approached that line honestly, and crossed it perhaps even by accident, before realizing in terror at some point that he was too deep to turn back. Still, my empathy for his situation has its limits. Marco Baldi’s Stevie Wonder video had only a few hundred views when Turra posted his version to his own huge audience. Baldi is not some venerated elder statesman of jazz, but a fellow young player working to keep his head above the same roiling water as Turra—and if their respective social media profiles are any indication, Baldi has a significantly less secure position than Turra himself did. It’s not really the same thing as posting your rendition of a Charlie Parker solo and expecting a reasonably informed audience to understand the reference. Turra’s sales of other people’s tabs also comes across as a blatant attempt to take money from the pockets of musicians who have put in the real work for it. 

Even Turra’s use of Instagram as his preferred platform seems like a calculated choice. The guitarists he was mimicking work mostly in deeply nerdy corners of YouTube, for audiences that I have to imagine are composed primarily of other musicians. They may be spectacular players, but their videos are not necessarily calibrated to dazzle the casual music fan. Turra seemed to understand that viewers might respond differently to the same virtuosity if he made a few tweaks to the look: the floral camp shirts, the bright natural lighting, the jam sessions recorded under palm trees and beside swimming pools. 

Cameron Fernandez, the classical guitarist YouTuber, made a particularly funny observation of this dynamic in his reaction video, advising guitarists to copy Turra’s visual style in the same way that he’d copied their music: “Separately, neither of you have a career, because you don’t know how to market your guitar solos, and [Turra] doesn’t know how to write a good guitar solo. But together, you help each other.” YouTube communities, with their interconnected universes of creators offering spirited meta-commentary on each other’s videos, have a way of policing their own boundaries and mores. Instagram Reels—where a viewer might watch five seconds of a guitar solo, go “damn, that’s sick,” smash the follow, then continue scrolling without thinking very much about any of it—may have seemed to Turra like an easier place to get away with it. 

As with all good scammer stories, Turra’s saga is so compelling in part because of the insecurities that it forces the duped to confront, like the way Bernie Madoff might make you wonder for a moment whether the entire economy is in fact some sort of pyramid scheme, or how the Fyre Fest debacle turned out to be a harbinger of sorts for a broader collapse of the music festival industry. Despite some very clear-cut wrongdoing, Turra comes across to me more as a bizarre tragicomic figure than the villainous mastermind he’s made out to be in the most breathless of the YouTube reactions. Given his somewhat Damonesque boyish features and his feed full of jazz in expensive-looking Italian locales, I can’t help but think of Tom, sobbing and alone at the end of The Talented Mr. Ripley, having isolated himself completely with the thoroughness of his deceit. 

No matter how much audio editing went into his videos, it’s pretty clear that Turra can at least play reasonably well, and that he spent considerable effort on his copying. It’s hard not to wonder while watching: Why not just spend some of that effort on coming up with his own material? Was it insecurity about his ability to write something good enough? Pressure to keep up a constant stream of new content on social media? Anxiety about the stability of his career at a time when making a living in music grows more difficult by the day? A sense that a bigger break was around the corner, if he could just keep grinding toward it? Desperation for someone, anyone at all, to recognize that he’s working really hard, that he has talent, that he’s doing a good job? Or maybe just an urge to prove to his parents that he’s not throwing his life away in pursuit of a hopeless dream. Take your pick—I know a few musicians who can relate.