Alberto Federico Domenico Tacchini was born on 6 December 1967 in Limbiate, a town north of Milan. After a scientific-track high school diploma in Milan in 1986, he trained classically, studying piano with Adrian Vasilache and harmony and composition with Aldo Rossi, before turning to jazz improvisation under Franco D'Andrea. He attended the Siena Jazz seminars in 1987, 1990 and 1994, winning the scholarship as best pianist at the 1994 edition, and in 1999 took first prize in the performers' section of the international Barga Jazz competition. In 2009 he completed a first-level academic jazz diploma, with highest honors, at the Conservatorio "G. Verdi" in Milan.

His recording career began the same decade he started performing seriously. In 1995 he debuted as a leader with the rock-jazz trio behind Proving Ground (Modern Times), alongside bassist Marco Micheli and drummer Roberto Gatto, already an established figure on the Rome jazz scene. That year he also appeared on Words for Evans (Splasc(h) Records), a session led by Luca Lapenna featuring trumpeter Paolo Fresu. Through the second half of the 1990s he became a regular presence in drummer Tiziano Tononi's projects (We Still Have Visions, credited to the group Nexus, 1997; We Did It, We Did It, 1999) and in saxophonist Claudio Fasoli's circle, appearing on Résumé (2000, issued with Musica Jazz magazine) and L'Essenza (2000, with Ferdinando Faraò).

Tacchini released his first album as an unaccompanied leader, Vertigo (Splasc(h) Records), in 2001, mixing live and studio material recorded across 1999 and 2000, including a multi-part suite for prepared piano. Drops (Splasc(h) Records, 2003) followed as a full-band statement: a quartet with bassist Giovanni Maier, drummer U.T. Gandhi and guitarist/electronics player Roberto Cecchetto, recorded at Artesuono Recording Studio in Udine. Its cover, a close monochrome photograph of Tacchini, is the source of this profile's portrait. Through the 2000s he also became a fixture of bassist/composer Roberto Bonati's various ensembles, including the ParmaFrontiere Orchestra (A Silvery Silence/Fragments From Moby Dick, 2006), the Quintet (Un Sospeso Silenzio, 2007, subtitled "Appunti a Pier Paolo Pasolini") and the Trio (Bianco il Vestito nel Buio, 2012), and of composer Dino Betti van der Noot's larger ensemble records (God Save the Earth, 2009; September's New Moon, 2011; The Stuff Dreams Are Made On, 2013).

His longest-running musical partnership is with singer Tiziana Ghiglioni, whom he met in the late 1980s while accompanying her jazz-voice classes at Milan's CPM institute (1994-1996). The two went on to perform together in duo and small-group settings for over two decades, documented on record with So Long Flores (2003/2004, a tribute to pianist Luca Flores), the co-billed Songs (Splasc(h) Records, 2011, his own original compositions set to Ghiglioni's lyrics, with Roberto Bonati on bass, Massimo Manzi on drums and Riccardo Luppi on tenor saxophone) and Figli (2011), on which he plays piano and arranges alongside Tiziano Tononi and Daniele Cavallanti.

April in Paris (C-Jam Joint, 2010), a duo record with saxophonist Silvio Binello built from jazz standards (Coltrane's "Giant Steps," Monk's "Epistrophy," Rollins's "Doxy" and Ellington's "Come Sunday" among them), is the one clearly mainstream-repertoire album in an otherwise contemporary-leaning discography. Space of Waiting (Splasc(h) Records, 2015), a trio with saxophonist Massimo Falascone and drummer Cristiano Calcagnile, is his most recent album as a leader; he continued working as a sideman afterward, including on Falascone's own septet album Méliès (Fonterossa Records, 2018/2019).

Alongside performing, Tacchini built real institutional standing in the Milan and Parma jazz scenes. In summer 2000 he co-founded C-JAM (Collettivo Jazzisti Autogestiti Milanesi) and, with it, the Ah-Um Milano Jazz Festival, serving as the festival's artistic director from 2000 to 2008. His teaching career began in 1992 (music theory, at the Civica Scuola di Musica di Opera) and passed through the Comune di Locate Triulzi's music workshop (1996-2008) and Milan's Conservatorio "G. Verdi" evening courses (2004-2007) before he joined the Conservatorio "Arrigo Boito" in Parma as a contract jazz piano teacher in 2006. He became titular holder of the jazz piano chair there through annually renewed appointments starting January 2008, was confirmed in a permanent teaching post from November 2018, and has since served on the conservatory's Consiglio Accademico (from the 2019-2020 academic year) and as coordinator of its New Languages and Musical Technologies department (from 2020-2021). He continues to perform there regularly in the "I Concerti del Boito" series, including solo recitals and thematic tribute programs (an Ornette Coleman evening in February 2025, a solo piano recital in February 2026), and remains an active performer more broadly, including a 2024 trio date ("Good News") at the same venue.

Radio Rai 3 broadcast three separate seasons of his duo programme "Invenzioni a due voci" (2001, 2002 and 2003). Musica Jazz magazine's Top Jazz critics' referendum named him the third-best new talent of 2002.

Tacchini's output splits fairly evenly between structured, contemporary-jazz small-group writing and looser, avant-garde-leaning collaboration. Vertigo and Space of Waiting, his two most personal statements as a leader, both explore prepared piano and extended technique; the latter, a trio with saxophonist Massimo Falascone and drummer Cristiano Calcagnile, sits closest to free jazz proper. Proving Ground, by contrast, is a straightforward rock-jazz trio record, and April in Paris commits fully to a standards repertoire, showing a mainstream, tradition-facing side of his playing that the rest of his discography, weighted toward originals, does not foreground.

The through-line across three decades of sideman work is a taste for structured, composer-led ensembles rather than blowing sessions: Tiziano Tononi's groups, Roberto Bonati's chamber-flavored jazz orchestras, and Dino Betti van der Noot's large-ensemble writing all foreground arrangement over solo display, and Tacchini's piano chair in each case functions inside that architecture. His own writing on Vertigo, Drops and Space of Waiting keeps a foot in that same structured-composition tradition while opening more room for improvisation than his sideman work typically allows.