Andrea Centazzo was born in Udine, in Italy's northeastern Friuli region, in 1948. He trained formally and broadly - a classical certificate in 1966, a law degree from the University of Trieste in 1972, a diploma in early-music studies from the University of Bologna in 1973, private percussion study at the Florence Conservatory from 1976 to 1978, private composition study with Sylvano Bussotti and Armando Gentilucci from 1979 to 1983, and eventually a Ph.D. in musicology from Bologna in 1985 - while building a parallel career as a self-taught improvising percussionist. He gave his first solo percussion concert in 1972 and cut his first album, the solo percussion record Ictus, in 1974.

The mid-1970s put him at the center of two of Italian jazz's most important circles at once. From 1974 to 1976 he held the drum chair in pianist Giorgio Gaslini's Quartet, alongside bassist Bruno Tommaso and reedist Gianni Bedori, documented on the albums 2° (1974), Concerto Della Resistenza (1974), Concerto Della Libertà / Universo Donna (1975) and Murales (1976) - all confirmed at the Discogs personnel-credit level. In 1975 he recorded Fragmentos, a trio date with bassist Bruno Tommaso and saxophonist Maurizio Giammarco, and Davanti E Oltre La Soglia, a duo with Giammarco.

In 1976 Centazzo and his then-wife Carla Lugli founded ICTUS Records in Bologna, one of the first musician-run labels in Europe. Its first release was Clangs, recorded February 20, 1976 in Casarsa, near Udine, a duo with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy - whom Centazzo has said he sought out in Milan as "one of the avant-garde scene's myths," and whose own advice to him, "play what you feel," he has cited as a lasting influence. Centazzo went on to record two more duo albums for the label in its first years: Drops (1977) with guitarist Derek Bailey, and The Bay (1979) with the ROVA Saxophone Quartet. The wider roster that recorded for Ictus over the label's first run (it closed in 1984 amid financial difficulty and the founders' divorce, before Centazzo revived it in the United States in the mid-2000s) also included Evan Parker, Pierre Favre, Andrew Cyrille, Lol Coxhill, Albert Mangelsdorff, Alvin Curran, Elliott Sharp, pianist Marilyn Crispell and clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi. Centazzo and Trovesi first met in 1978 at New York's Public Theatre, where Centazzo was touring with John Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne and other improvisers while Trovesi was playing in Giorgio Gaslini's group; they went on to record a full duo album together, Shock!! (1984, reissued 1999 and again in 2006 as A New Shock!!).

Centazzo's own catalog through the late 1970s and 1980s ran in parallel with his growing international address book. Environment For Sextet (1979, recorded live for the New York radio station WKCR) is credited jointly to Centazzo, John Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne, Tom Cora, Toshinori Kondo and Polly Bradfield - a genuine document of Centazzo working inside the same downtown-New-York improvising circle as Zorn in the years just before the Knitting Factory scene coalesced. He also recorded with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo directly that same year (Fuigo From A Different Dimension, 1979) and, into the 2000s, with guitarist Henry Kaiser (on Kaiser's Derek Bailey tribute Domo Arigato Derek-Sensei!, 2006, and later More Requia, 2019) and led his own Derek Bailey Tribute Band (2013). He developed several original percussion instruments along the way, most notably the icebell, shaped from the bell of a broken cymbal, plus the ogororo, tampang and a square bell, some built in partnership with the Italian cymbal maker UFIP.

His larger-ensemble writing crystallized as the Andrea Centazzo Mitteleuropa Orchestra, an ensemble drawing on his own Friulian roots, documented across Cjant - Concerto Per Piccola Orchestra (1983), Doctor Faustus and other Ictus-era recordings, and later the Andrea Centazzo Large Ensemble and Invasion Orchestra. After 1986 his work shifted increasingly toward opera (three, starting with Tina, premiered 1996), orchestral composition (two symphonies, and a catalog he describes as running to roughly 500 compositions across all genres of ensemble), and video/multimedia art - more than twenty video films, several award-winning, and large multidisciplinary projects such as Mandala (2005), Eternal Traveler (2007) and Einstein's Cosmic Messengers (2008-2011). Tides of Gravity (2016) paired his music with visualizations produced in partnership with LIGO, NASA and Caltech around the first direct detection of gravitational waves.

Even as that multimedia and orchestral output grew, Centazzo kept releasing improvised and percussion-centered recordings on Ictus into the 2020s - Sacred Gong Dive (2017), Trigonos (2018), Steps (2021), Binary Souls (2022) - and reissued much of his archive, including previously unreleased Steve Lacy material as The Ictus Archives, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (2023). His Discogs artist entity carries 246 total credits (155 as a leader or co-leader). He became a naturalized United States citizen (sources differ on the exact year, either 1992 or 2000) and lives in the Los Angeles area, where he continues to record, teach and perform; the University of Bologna established a dedicated archive of his manuscripts and recordings, the "Fondo Andrea Centazzo," in the early 2010s, and he gave a solo concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in 2011. Across his career he has given more than 1,500 concerts and performances in Europe and the United States.

Centazzo's playing grew out of the same European free-improvisation current as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and Han Bennink - non-idiomatic, texturally driven percussion playing that treats gongs, bells, found metal and self-built instruments as compositional material in their own right, not just a rhythm section role. That instinct is what drove the icebell and his other instrument-building, and it is what connects his 1970s work in Gaslini's acoustic jazz quartet to his same-decade duo and group recordings with far more radical improvisers like Steve Lacy, John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourne. Ictus Records itself functioned as an extension of that aesthetic: a musician-run label built to document improvised music the major Italian labels of the 1970s had no interest in.

From the mid-1980s on, that improvising sensibility widened into concert-length multimedia works, orchestral writing and opera, but the through-line - treating found and invented percussion sound as a primary compositional voice - runs from his first solo concert in 1972 through his most recent Ictus-label recordings in the 2020s.