Carmine Ugo "Charlie" Mariano was born November 12, 1923, in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in the city's Hyde Park neighborhood, the son of Italian immigrants Giovanni ("John") Mariano and Maria ("Mary") Di Gironimo, who had come from the town of Fallo in Italy's Abruzzo region. His father's opera records and the big-band broadcasts of Duke Ellington and Count Basie were his earliest musical education; he started performing professionally around age eighteen, in the clubs of Boston's "Combat Zone." After enlisting in the Army Air Corps during World War II — three years of service that kept him stateside playing in military ensembles rather than in combat — he returned to Boston and enrolled at the Schillinger House of Music, the school that would become Berklee College of Music, studying under saxophonist and educator Joe Viola and graduating in 1951. A performance by Charlie Parker on the West Coast during these years left a lasting mark on his conception of the alto saxophone. Mariano also co-founded Boston's Jazz Workshop, a club and informal school that gave the city's postwar jazz scene a home, and he would return to Berklee as faculty at several points over the following two decades.

Mariano toured with Stan Kenton's Orchestra from 1953 to 1955, the stint that built his early national reputation, and worked in the orbit of Shelly Manne and other West Coast players during the same period. In 1959 he married pianist, composer, and fellow Berklee-connected musician Toshiko Akiyoshi, whom he had met while both were teaching and studying in Boston. The couple co-led a group on and off through the marriage — documented on record as the Toshiko-Mariano Quartet — and had a daughter, Michiru (later known professionally as the singer-songwriter Monday Michiru), before divorcing in 1967.

In between, Mariano spent 1962 and 1963 as a sideman in Charles Mingus's bands, a period documented across several of Mingus's most significant recordings: he is on the recovered tapes of the October 1962 Town Hall Concert (released only later, on 1994's The Complete Town Hall Concert — the original 1962 LP mix does not include him), on the landmark The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963, Impulse!), and on three tracks of Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (recorded January and September 1963, released 1964), sharing alto saxophone duties on that album with Eric Dolphy. Mingus's own career, and this same sideman period from his side of the story, is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile.

Mariano's next reinvention came from further afield. In the early-to-mid 1970s he traveled to a remote village in Tamil Nadu, South India, to study the nadaswaram — a loud, oboe-like double-reed instrument central to Carnatic classical and devotional music — years before "world music" fusion became a recognizable jazz trend. That study grew into a collaboration of more than two decades with Bangalore's Karnataka College of Percussion, founded by mridangam player T. A. S. Mani, and reached its fullest studio statement on Jyothi (1983, ECM), recorded with the KCP ensemble and vocalist R. A. Ramamani. Mariano moved to Europe in 1971, and the same decade saw him co-found Pork Pie (1973-1976) with Dutch keyboardist Jasper van't Hof, alongside guitarist Philip Catherine, bassist Jean-François Jenny-Clark, and drummer Aldo Romano — a short-lived but highly regarded fusion band whose 1974 album Transitory (MPS) is still cited as one of the era's defining fusion records. In 1975 he became a founding member of the German all-star fusion big band the United Jazz + Rock Ensemble, an association that continued for years afterward.

Mariano eventually settled in Cologne, Germany, with his third wife, painter Dorothee Zippel, continuing to record prolifically into the 2000s — leader dates on European labels like Konnex, Intuition, Enja, and Schneeball, duo and small-group records that kept threading Carnatic music, European jazz, and his bebop foundation together, alongside a later fusion project called Osmosis. He never fully left his hometown scene behind either: bandleader and impresario George Wein, on Mariano's death, called him "the dean of Boston jazz musicians" — a fitting title for a career that ran from Boston's Combat Zone clubs through Kenton's and Mingus's bands to a Tamil Nadu village and finally to four decades based in Germany. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1995 and given roughly a year to live; a combination of conventional and alternative treatment kept him performing and recording for another fourteen years. He died June 16, 2009, at the Mildred Scheel Hospiz in Cologne, at age 85; his ashes were entombed at his family's grave in Boston.

Mariano's defining achievement was building a genuinely two-way fusion between jazz and South Indian classical music: rather than sampling Indian sounds for exotic color, as later "world jazz" often did, he spent years learning the nadaswaram on its own terms in Tamil Nadu and built a real, decades-long working relationship with Carnatic musicians, most fully realized on Jyothi. That achievement sits on top of a bebop foundation shaped by Charlie Parker and sharpened across the Kenton and Mingus years — the alto voice that made him a first-call sideman before he ever picked up the nadaswaram. The European fusion years with Pork Pie and the United Jazz + Rock Ensemble added a rock-inflected, electric-instrument dimension to that same restless, cross-cultural curiosity, making Mariano one of the more genuinely itinerant and hybrid voices to emerge from the postwar American jazz scene.