Enzo Restuccia, born Vincenzo Restuccia, was a drummer and percussionist from Naples, born on March 19, 1941. His mother was Neapolitan and his father came from Avola in Sicily. He studied drums with Romeo De Piscopo, the older brother of Tullio De Piscopo, took a percussion diploma at the conservatory in L'Aquila, and moved to Rome, where RCA Italiana quickly made him one of its session players. Early work there included sessions under Ennio Morricone and singles for Paul Anka, among them a 1968 45 rpm release.

The same RCA circle produced the jazz dates that matter most here. In 1969 the American guitarist Barney Kessel recorded two albums for RCA in Rome with local rhythm players. On Kessel's Kit, cut at RCA's Studio B in Rome, Restuccia is the drummer in a band with Carlo Pes on second guitar, Giovanni Tommaso on bass, Antonello Vannucchi on organ and Ciro Cicco on percussion. On Reflections in Rome, he plays drums on two tracks, "Free Wheeling" and "Shufflin' the Blues," while the Swiss drummer Daniel Humair takes the other seven.

The next year he turned up across much of the Roman jazz-rock and jazz-funk scene. Tommaso's large-ensemble record La Banda del Cibo Salutare (RCA, 1970) put him in a double-drum rhythm section beside Gegè Munari, behind Gato Barbieri and Steve Lacy on saxophones, Franco D'Andrea on piano and Dino Piana on trombone. He played drums on Sandro Brugnolini's Overground (Sincro, 1970), a film-linked session with Tommaso on bass that Discogs files under jazz-rock and jazz-funk, and on Amedeo Tommasi's The Sound (Cenacolo, 1970), where he is credited with drums and percussion. Through the 1970s he also worked on Piero Umiliani's jazz-oriented Liuto and Horo releases, including L'uomo e la città (1976), most of whose tracks carry his drumming, and the Ellington-repertoire Jazz a Confronto 35 (1977), where he plays percussion.

His main income, though, came from pop, film and broadcast work, and the record should say so plainly. He played on records by Fabrizio De André (Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo, 1971, and Storia di un impiegato, 1973), Sergio Endrigo, Ornella Vanoni, Angelo Branduardi, Claudio Baglioni, Loretta Goggi and Nino Ferrer, and he often worked with the arranger Nicola Piovani at Rome's Ortophonic studios. He sat in the RAI orchestra as a drummer on many television broadcasts, played in eight consecutive Sanremo Festival editions from 1993 to 2000, and later drummed in Morricone's touring orchestra. In the 1980s he taught drums at the conservatory in Perugia and at the Saint Louis College of Music.

Jazz stayed a parallel thread. Wikipedia describes him as playing in Marcello Rosa's quintet and in the Marcello Rosa Trad Band, and lists Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman and Paco de Lucía among the musicians he worked with. He married the violist Anna Giordano, and their daughter Marina, born in 1969, became the singer Marina Rei; in later years father and daughter often performed together. Restuccia passed away in Rome on December 5, 2021, at the age of 80.

Restuccia was a studio drummer in the Roman tradition: reliable time, quick reading and a feel that adapted to whatever the session wanted, from a Barney Kessel bossa to a film cue to a De André concept album. The credits show him moving easily between swing-based jazz, jazz-funk and jazz-rock, and the double-drum setup on La Banda del Cibo Salutare and the Umiliani sessions show he could work inside larger ensembles as well as small groups.

His jazz side was real but secondary. Roughly one in ten of the one hundred or so releases Discogs credits him on is a jazz-genre record, set against a career that was mostly pop, singer-songwriter, film and television work, and he did not lead jazz albums of his own. He is best understood as a sideman who was in the room for a particular slice of Italian jazz history, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when RCA Italiana and the Roman studios brought American visitors such as Kessel together with local players like Tommaso and Tommasi.