Alessandro Galati was born in Florence in 1966. He studied piano across both classical and jazz repertoire, guided in jazz by double bassist and composer Bruno Tommaso, and has taught piano and jazz combo arrangement in his home city since 1988, at the Accademia Musicale di Firenze and at the Centro Attività Musicali.

He built his recording career around a working method he has kept for three decades: pairing his own trio or solo playing with rotating casts of internationally significant sidemen, then documenting the results on record. His 1995 debut as a leader, Traction Avant (Via Veneto Jazz), set the pattern early - a trio with Swedish bassist Palle Danielsson and American drummer Peter Erskine, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug (the engineer behind much of ECM's classic 1970s-80s sound at Oslo's Talent Studio) and carrying liner notes from trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. The album's Citroën-themed title and cover (a 2CV line drawing) continued a year later on Citroën Saxo (1996), which swapped in bassist John Patitucci, kept Erskine on drums, and added saxophonist Bob Sheppard - the same three internationally touring Americans he would reunite with 14 years later on Jason Salad! (2010, Via Veneto Jazz).

Through the late 1990s and 2000s he alternated between small-group dates and solo work: Europhilia (1999, Arci Firenze) with bassist Paolino Dalla Porta and drummer Massimo Manzi; All Alone (2005), his first release for the Japanese label Blue Gleam and, true to its title, an unaccompanied solo record; Angoli Confusi (2006, Double Stroke), a trio billing with tenor/soprano saxophonist Pietro Tonolo and singer-guitarist Barbara Casini; and g plays G (2008), a full recital of Gershwin's music played solo.

2010 was his busiest single year on record, with three releases: Unstandards (Via Veneto Jazz), a quintet featuring bassist Ares Tavolazzi, Norwegian drummer Paolo Vinaccia, guitarist Jacob Young and reedman Simone Santini; Imaginerie (Blue Gleam), a duo record with Tavolazzi alone; and Cubicq, credited to the newly billed Alessandro Galati Trio with Tavolazzi and drummer Emanuele Maniscalco. (Some secondary sources date Cubicq to 2007, matching a Japanese Swing Journal "best CDs of the year" citation for that year; Discogs dates the release itself to 2010, and the two dates could not be reconciled from the sources checked for this profile - see this profile's alessandro-galati_notes.md for detail.) Tavolazzi became his most frequent collaborator across the 2010s, returning for the Kenny Wheeler tribute Wheeler Variations (2017, Somethin' Cool) and the Charlie Haden tribute For Haden's Sake (2020, Jazzmud).

By 2014 Galati had settled into the trio that would carry most of his output for the rest of the decade: bassist Gabriele Evangelista and drummer Stefano Tamborrino. Seals (2014, Via Veneto Jazz) opened that run and was named Best Instrumental Album of the Year by the Japanese magazine Jazz Critique (Jazz Hihyo); On a Sunny Day (2015) repeated the award the following year. The same trio recorded Cold Sand (2017, Atelier Sawano), Outer Gold, Inner Lord (2018), Shades of Sounds (2018) and Live from the Inside Out (2019), the latter three for the Japanese label Terasima Records, run by producer Yasukuni Terashima, which became his main recording home through the 2020s. Alongside the trio records he kept making smaller-group and single-partner albums: the vocal duo Lawns (2011, with Simona Severini) and later The Cole Porter Songbook (2020, with singer Chiara Pancaldi); the free-leaning tenor-and-piano duo 2 of a Mind (2012, with German saxophonist Matthias Schubert); the solo record September in Japan (2014); and the electronics duo Noizes (2015, with Andrea Rucci).

A new trio, with bassist Guido Zorn and drummer Andrea Beninati, recorded two thematic Terasima albums back to back in 2022: European Walkabout, built around European traditional melodies, and Portrait in Black and White, a full set of Antonio Carlos Jobim compositions. Most recently, Terasima released his three-volume Plays Standards project (December 2024), a 23-track return to the jazz standards repertoire.

Galati's own biography, repeated across his Discogs profile and label materials, names a long list of further collaborators beyond those documented above - among them Andy Sheppard, Mike Mainieri, Arild Andersen, David Murray, Steve Lacy, Lee Konitz, Steve Grossman, Dave Liebman, Michael Moore, Enrico Rava and Paolo Fresu - reflecting a touring career that has taken him through Switzerland, France, Austria, Norway, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, China and Japan. No specific recorded session with Rava or Fresu could be independently verified for this profile, so neither is treated as a confirmed credit here; see alessandro-galati_notes.md.

His work has drawn sustained attention in Japan in particular: beyond the two Jazz Critique "Best Instrumental Album" awards, Cubicq made Swing Journal's best-of-year list, Seals placed on Musica Jazz's Top Jazz critics' poll and Jazzit's and UK Vibe's top-100 lists for 2014, and All About Jazz Italia included him in its 2017 "Best of Jazz" playlist.

Galati's core catalogue - the trio records with Ares Tavolazzi, then with Gabriele Evangelista and Stefano Tamborrino, then with Guido Zorn and Andrea Beninati - sits in a lyrical, melody-first post-bop trio tradition, closer in temperament to the unhurried, songful side of the American piano-trio lineage than to Italy's own free-jazz and avant-garde currents. Reviewers have specifically noted an "old school" quality to his sound and an unhurried, melody-driven touch. That same melodic instinct carries into his tribute and songbook projects - Gershwin (g plays G), Kenny Wheeler (Wheeler Variations), Charlie Haden (For Haden's Sake), Cole Porter (The Cole Porter Songbook) and Jobim (Portrait in Black and White) - each one built around a single composer's book rather than a mixed-repertoire date.

Against that mainstream core, a handful of records show a more exploratory side: 2 of a Mind, a free-tending tenor-and-piano duo with Matthias Schubert, and Noizes, a duo with electronics player Andrea Rucci, both stand apart from the trio's lyricism and toward the same avant-garde-adjacent territory several of his Italian peers work in more fully.