Achille Succi is mainly self-taught. He came up through Italian jazz workshops rather than a conservatory track: a Henghel Gualdi workshop in 1986, Siena Jazz in 1988 and again in 1994, and the Umbria Jazz Berklee Clinics in 1992, which won him a scholarship for one semester at Berklee College of Music in Boston the following year. In 1995 an IASJ (International Association of Schools of Jazz) scholarship took him to the Rimon School in Tel Aviv, and in 1997 the "Pepinieres Europeennes pour Jeunes Artistes" award funded a three-month residency at the Rhythmic Conservatory of Copenhagen. That same year and again in 1999 he attended Dave Liebman's masterclasses in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.

He plays alto saxophone, bass clarinet and clarinet, and the two reed instruments define two different sides of his work. On alto he is the player critic Bill Schoemaker described mid-solo as wielding "a fiery alto saxophone"; on bass clarinet, which he plays at least as often as the saxophone, he works in a lower, more textural register that has made him a first-call voice in Italy's avant-garde and free-improvised scene. Bill Schoemaker named him in the Italian jazz newspaper Giornale della Musica (January 2010) as "one of the European musicians to keep an eye on in the next ten years," and critic Mario Gamba called him a "genius of Italian jazz" in Alias (March 20, 2010). Writer Ken Waxman summarized the shape of his career this way: "Although his own sessions as leader aren't that numerous, Modena-born saxophonist and clarinetist Achille Succi seems to be the go-to guy when adventurous Italian composers want to add professional zing to their projects."

That description matches the discography. Succi's Discogs catalogue runs to 185 releases, all but a handful as a sideman, going back to a 1991 credit and running to a 2026 release. His two earliest working relationships as a leader both began in the mid-2000s: the duo with double bassist and cellist Salvatore Maiore, first documented on Pequenas Flores do Inferno (El Gallo Rojo, 2006), and the Achille Succi Ensemble, whose Terra (Splasc(h) Records, recorded September 2005, released 2006) paired him with trombonist and tuba player Beppe Caruso, Maiore again, and drummer Roberto Dani. His first record under his own name alone was Shiva's Dance (Artesuono, 2003), a quintet with trumpeter Ralph Alessi and vibraphonist Andrea Dulbecco.

As a sideman, the range is wide even by the standards of Italy's cooperative jazz scene. He is a credited member of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, playing alto saxophone on the eighteen-piece band's Previsioni del Tempo / Forecast (2002) alongside Gianluigi Trovesi, Paolo Damiani and Pino Minafra. He played alto saxophone, clarinet and bass clarinet in the Giorgio Gaslini Proxima Centauri Orchestra across Enigma (Soul Note, 2001) and Urban Griot (Soul Note, 2003), and appears in Franco D'Andrea's "Eleven" project, from its 1999 debut through Sketches of the 20th Century (2023). In 2008 he played on the Uri Caine Ensemble's The Othello Syndrome (Winter & Winter), Caine's Verdi-based project. A decade earlier, in 1997, he appeared on La Geometria dell'Abisso (Splasc(h) Records) credited alongside Kenny Wheeler in Alfredo Impullitti's Kaos Ensemble, and in 1998 and 1999 he toured Scandinavia, Brazil and Australia with Danish guitarist Pierre Dorge's New Jungle Orchestra, documented on the group's 1999 album Giraf (with John Tchicai and Josefine Cronholm). His own biography, repeated across several festival and label pages, also lists collaborations with Carla Bley, George Russell, Steve Coleman, Louis Sclavis and Ernst Reijseger; the Sclavis and Reijseger connections are independently corroborated as guest appearances with Succi's own collective trio Atman (founded with pianist Fabrizio Puglisi and guitarist Alberto Capelli), while no specific recording or dated performance with Bley or Russell could be independently confirmed (see notes).

More recently he has recorded as a featured member of bassist Furio Di Castri's working group, on Sunday Afternoon (Parco della Musica Records, 2024) with trumpeter Giovanni Falzone, and on Navigare (Parco della Musica Records, 2025), a quintet with Di Castri, drummer Ettore Fioravanti, German trumpeter Markus Stockhausen and pianist Danilo Tarso. His own leader and co-led catalogue since 2010 includes the trio session Conduction 3 (with Carlo Alberto Canevali and Yuri Goloubev), Moon in Winter (2011, with Andrea Centazzo, Dave Ballou, Daniel Barbiero and Nobu Stowe), the trio record Freetrio (2014), a duo of Bach reinterpretations with saxophonist Mario Marzi, Bach in Black (Map Classics, 2016), the trio album Three Branches (El Gallo Rojo, 2016), Roots (Velut Luna, 2016, with Pietro Ballestrero), and Free Sessions Vol. 1: Planets of Kei (Not Two Records, 2017, with Samo Salamon and Szilard Mezei). Gargano Urbano: Contemporary Jazz from Rural Singing to Hip-Hop (Da Vinci Jazz, 2020) is his most ambitious leader project, reworking the folk repertoire of Italy's Gargano peninsula through a jazz quintet alongside folk singers, hip-hop and electronic guests. He also appears on The White Nights Suite (Filibusta Records, 2021, with the Danilo Blaiotta Trio and trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso) and Book of Innocence (Notami Jazz, 2022, a duo with bassist Stefano Travaglini).

Succi has taught for two decades. He has led ensemble classes at the civic music school of Nonantola, near Modena, since teaching alongside his own performing career began; he has been a faculty member of the summer workshops at Siena Jazz since 2001; and since 2006 he has taught clarinet and improvisation technique at the conservatories of Ferrara, Bologna and Brescia. He has also taught jazz saxophone at the Conservatorio Statale di Musica "G. Rossini" in Pesaro. He continues to hold improvisation workshops and masterclasses across Italy and to record and perform, most recently on the 2025 and 2026 releases listed above.

Succi's playing sits across two registers that rarely belong to the same career: the alto saxophone, played with what one reviewer called fearless, spontaneous energy, and the bass clarinet, an instrument he plays as often as the saxophone and treats as a full-voiced lead rather than a doubling instrument. Being mainly self-taught shows in the result, a personal style not tied to a single lineage, equally comfortable inside tightly written big-band charts and inside fully open improvisation.

That range is visible in the two poles of his working life. On one side sit the large-ensemble, through-composed projects: the Italian Instabile Orchestra, Giorgio Gaslini's Proxima Centauri Orchestra, and Franco D'Andrea's "Eleven," all of which use Succi's reeds inside dense, arranged writing descended from European big-band and third-stream practice. On the other side sit his own small-group and duo projects, built around close, conversational interplay with a single other voice: the long duo with bassist Salvatore Maiore, the more recent duo with saxophonist Mario Marzi reworking Bach, and the duo with bassist Stefano Travaglini on Book of Innocence. Gargano Urbano adds a third strand, carrying the folk song of Italy's Gargano peninsula into a jazz-and-hip-hop frame, which is the clearest expression of the ethno-jazz current running through his catalogue. Across all three modes, critics have consistently pointed to the same quality: a music that stays "free enough to play anything" while never losing a sense of structure, in small-group and large-ensemble settings alike.