Alberto Braida started piano lessons at seven and went on to earn his diploma at the "G. Nicolini" Conservatory in Piacenza. Between 1989 and 1991 he attended the Siena jazz seminars, and from the start of his career he committed to free improvisation and the relationship between improvisation and composition, rather than a conventional jazz-piano trajectory.

In 1995 he formed a trio with bassist Tito Mangialajo Rantzer and drummer Carlo Virzi, recorded the following year and issued as Trio '97 on Centro Musica Creativa. It remains his only conventional working piano trio outside the long duo described below. In 1996 he began working regularly with clarinetist Giancarlo Locatelli, and the two started rehearsing together that year. Braida founded the Takla Improvising Group in 1997 and his own label, Takla Records, the following year, and it was on Takla that the Braida/Locatelli duo released its debut, Diciannove Calefazioni, in 1999, three years after the first rehearsal.

The duo has continued ever since, moving from Takla to Z-rec (Due, 2004), to Red Toucan Records (Nel Margine, 2013), and since 2019 to We Insist! Records, a Milan label whose own account of its catalogue centers substantially on documenting Locatelli's work. From Here From There (2021) and In Movimento (2025) are both We Insist! releases; the label's own liner copy for In Movimento, recorded live on 18 May 2024 in Cernusco sul Naviglio and at home in Melzo on 8 May 2024, describes the album as marking a new stage in a thirty-year journey between the two musicians, dating from the 1996 rehearsals.

Alongside the duo, Braida has built a wide network of trio and duo partnerships, each one traceable to a specific, credit-verified release rather than a general claim of collaboration. Aria (Free Elephant, 2005) is a trio with German bassist Peter Kowald, recorded live in 2002 at the Accademia Musicale "F. Gaffurio" in Lodi, with Locatelli completing the group. Piovono Bici (Rastascan Records, 2011), credited to the group name Smonta Tutto, is a trio with Locatelli and American percussionist Gino Robair. A Brush With Dignity (Clean Feed, 2009), credited to the group Weightless, adds British saxophonist John Butcher and bassist John Edwards to a quartet with drummer Fabrizio Spera. Reg Erg (Red Toucan, 2007) pairs him in duo with Dutch bassist Wilbert de Joode; Di Terra (Nu Bop Records, 2006) is a trio with American bassist Lisle Ellis and Spera; Redshift (Setola di Maiale, 2010) is a duo with saxophonist Edoardo Marraffa; In Time (Edition Explico, 2011) is a duo with German cellist and trombonist Günter Christmann; Mobile (brokenresearch, 2006) is a duo with bassist John Hughes.

He has also recorded solo: Talus (Nuscope Recordings, 2009), on a Fazioli F278 concert grand, and In Love with the Moon (We Insist! Records, 2019), a four-part solo meditation reviewed by All About Jazz alongside comparisons to Thelonious Monk and Paul Bley. Cats in the Kitchen (We Insist!, 2021) moves the format again, a trio with bassist Silvia Bolognesi and drummer Cristiano Calcagnile, its nine compositions reportedly drawn from a picture made by Braida's young daughter.

Outside jazz, Braida has also recorded in a contemporary-classical vein with violinist Virginia Sutera, on two Anser albums for Stradivarius (2020 and 2023), catalogued by Discogs under the Classical genre rather than jazz.

Braida teaches piano and harmony at the Accademia Musicale "F. Gaffurio" in Lodi, where he also co-directs the "Contemporaneamente" festival with violinist A. Campagnoli and Locatelli. He has performed at the Vision Festival (New York), the Umbrella Festival (Chicago), the Improvised and Otherwise Festival (New York), the International Jazz Festival (Vancouver), the Total Music Meeting (Berlin), Konfrontationen (Nickelsdorf), and Jazz Cerkno (Slovenia), among others, and his records have drawn independent reviews from All About Jazz across nearly two decades: Mobile (2006), Reg Erg (2007), Nel Margine (2013), In Love with the Moon (2019), and Cats in the Kitchen (2021).

His most recent documented credit, as of this profile, is A Decent Run (We Insist! Records, released 28 May 2026), a project led by Locatelli setting the English poet Tom Raworth's words to music, with Braida on piano alongside cellist Luca Tilli, trombonist Sebi Tramontana, and vocalist and violinist Carla Kihlstedt.

Braida's work sits inside the European free-improvisation tradition: fully improvised music that, in the description several reviewers have applied to his duo with Locatelli, often sounds through-composed even when it is not. His main instrumental partnership, with a single reed player and no rhythm section, leaves harmony and form open to be built and dissolved in real time, a format he has returned to for thirty years rather than treating as one album among many.

His other regular format, working in duo or trio against a single bassist or a single reed or brass player, extends the same idea outward: Peter Kowald, Wilbert de Joode, Lisle Ellis, and Edoardo Marraffa each anchor a different record built around a two- or three-way conversation rather than a fixed working band. The quartet setting of A Brush With Dignity, with John Butcher and John Edwards, is the closest he comes to a larger ensemble sound, and even there the writing stays open rather than through-arranged.

His solo records take the opposite tack: Talus, recorded on a Fazioli concert grand, and In Love with the Moon both strip the format down to piano alone, and the latter has drawn direct critical comparison to Thelonious Monk and Paul Bley, two pianists whose own vocabularies sit at the boundary between composition and improvisation. A separate, contemporary-classical strand of his work, the two Anser albums with violinist Virginia Sutera, sits outside the jazz catalogue entirely and is not treated as part of his jazz style, but shows the same interest in written/improvised boundary questions carried into a notated idiom.