Aldo Romano was born in Belluno, in the Veneto, on January 16, 1941, and his family moved to France while he was a child. By the 1950s he was working professionally in Paris on both guitar and drums, and in 1963 he began playing with Don Cherry.

That association places him at the origin of European free jazz rather than in its second generation. Cherry had come out of Ornette Coleman's quartet and was assembling bands in Europe, and Romano was the drummer he worked with in Paris. Romano went on to record with Steve Lacy across Disposability and Sortie (both 1966) and Epistrophy (1969), to appear on Jazz Realities (1966) alongside Carla Bley, Mike Mantler, Lacy and Kent Carter, to play in the Rolf and Joachim Kühn Quartet, and to tour with Dexter Gordon.

The simple version of his story is that he left Italy and made his career elsewhere, and the histories of Italian jazz have often treated him that way. The record does not support it cleanly. In 1966, three years after the Cherry association began, he is credited on drums on Giorgio Gaslini's Nuovi Sentimenti (New Feelings) Suite, which puts him inside the Italian avant-garde at the same moment he was inside the French one.

He began releasing albums under his own name at the end of the 1970s, and the titles form their own argument: Il Piacere (1979), Non Dimenticar (1993), Corners (1999), Chante and Il Cammino (2005), Origine (2010). To Be Ornette To Be (1989) is the first of two records he built around Ornette Coleman's music.

Through the 1980s and 1990s he was a fixture on Italian sessions without living in Italy. He is the drummer on Furio Di Castri's Things (1985), on the Paolo Damiani Quintet's Poor Memory (1988), on Voices, Live in Rome (1989) with Damiani, Tiziana Ghiglioni and Lauren Newton, on Volte (1989) with Franco D'Andrea, on two volumes of Bill Evans compositions with Stefano Battaglia and Paolino Dalla Porta in 1993 and 1994, on Massimo Urbani's Invitation (1995), on the Giovanni Tommaso Quintets' Third Step: Good Bye 900 (1998), and on So Right (2005) with Maria Pia De Vito, Danilo Rea and Enzo Pietropaoli. A live recording from 1990, released in 2006 as Live at JazzBO' 90, has him behind Enrico Rava, Urbani, D'Andrea and Tommaso at once.

In 1995 he joined Palatino, a quartet with Paolo Fresu on trumpet, Michel Benita on double bass and Glenn Ferris on trombone, which made three albums between 1995 and 2001.

He also played a direct part in launching Michel Petrucciani, appearing on Flash (1980), the pianist's self-titled 1981 album and Estate with the Petrucciani Trio in 1982, and on later Petrucciani records including Playground and Date with Time (both 1991). He is on Chet Baker in Paris (1989) with Chet Baker, René Urtreger and Pierre Michelot.

The largest single project of his career looks away from Europe entirely. Between 1990 and 1993 he made two tours of Central and West Africa with the French reed player Louis Sclavis and the bassist Henri Texier, going after the roots of the music rather than his own, and returned to East and southern Africa in 1997. Three albums came out of it, Carnet de Routes (1995), Suite Africaine (1999) and African Flashback (2005), made alongside the photographer Guy Le Querrec, who travelled with the trio. In 2004 he won the Jazzpar Prize, and released The Jazzpar Prize on Enja.

In 2010, at 69, he recorded Complete Communion to Don Cherry, forty-seven years after he began playing with Cherry in Paris, with Texier on bass, Géraldine Laurent on saxophone and the Turin trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso. The programme mixes his own writing with compositions by Cherry and Ornette Coleman.

He is 85 and still recording. His most recent album as leader in the Discogs record is Reborn (2020).

Romano's playing is loose-limbed and melodic rather than propulsive for its own sake, which is what made him usable across a range of settings that should not have shared a drummer. He came up inside free jazz at its European beginning, and the freedom in his time never left, but he is not primarily a free player: most of his working life has been spent inside form, holding a band without flattening it.

The two constants across sixty years are Ornette Coleman's music and Italian song. He recorded To Be Ornette To Be in 1989 and Complete Communion to Don Cherry in 2010, and between and around them ran a sequence of albums whose titles are in Italian and whose material keeps returning to it. His work as an accompanist reflects the same split: the Africa trilogy with Sclavis and Texier on one side, and a long line of Italian sessions on the other.