Andrea Lombardini was born in Venice on December 4, 1978. He studied philosophy at the University of Padua and later earned a diploma in jazz music at the Conservatorio "Agostino Steffani." Largely self-taught on electric bass, his formative period abroad included a summer studying at Berklee College of Music in 1995 under Anthony Vitty, Joe Santerre and John Repucci; bass study with Harvie Swartz and harmony study with Garry Dial in the summer of 2000; improvisation seminars with Lee Konitz and Steve Swallow; and Siena Jazz seminars in 2001.

He made his professional debut in his early twenties in the quartet Randomania, alongside trombonist Gianluca Petrella, guitarist Roberto Cecchetto and drummer U.T. Gandhi. His own trio, billed as ALT (Andrea Lombardini Trio) with saxophonist Michele Polga and drummer Massimo Chiarella, won the Baronissi Jazz competition in 2002 and recorded its debut, La Première Heure (2004, Azzurra Music), in the following years. In 2004 Lombardini also won the international Euro Bass Day competition for electric bassists. Petrella, Cecchetto, Francesco Bearzatti and Pietro Tonolo are all named in his own published biography as musicians he has worked with professionally since 2000, but no specific recorded session with any of the four could be independently confirmed via Discogs for this profile (see notes).

Lombardini's most substantial run of leader and co-leader recordings came on the Italian label C.A.M. Jazz across the 2010s. SPL (2013) is a trio billed to trumpeter Fulvio Sigurtà, Lombardini and drummer Alessandro Paternesi, pairing acoustic and eight-string electric bass with live signal processing against a guest Hammond-organ chair from British organist Ross Stanley and percussionist Michele Rabbia; Discogs tags it Contemporary Jazz, Noise and Prog Rock. Diminuendo (2016) was his first true leader album: a trio with French serpent and tuba player Michel Godard and pianist/drummer Emanuele Maniscalco, recorded at Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg, Germany in January 2016 and produced by Johannes Wohlleben. Lombardini plays both electric bass (a Longhorn model) and the colascione, an early Italian long-necked lute, across the record. All About Jazz's Daniele Vogrig reviewed it favorably on release, describing it as kaleidoscopic in its range of timbres while holding a coherent narrative arc. Two Grounds (2018) followed as a trio with keyboardist Claudio Filippini and drummer U.T. Gandhi, recorded live on June 10, 2017 at Le Due Terre Winery in Prepotto, Friuli. In between, Lombardini also recorded Emancipation (2017, C.A.M. Jazz) as a member of the Alessandro Rossi Quartet (billed on some later releases as Em4ncipation), alongside drummer-leader Alessandro Rossi, guitarist Massimo Imperatore and reedist Massimiliano Milesi.

From 2020 on, Lombardini has recorded regularly with New Zealand-born keyboardist and producer Mark de Clive-Lowe and drummer Tommaso Cappellato as a broken-beat- and soul-jazz-inflected trio, on Dreamweavers (2020), the companion release Masina / Mizugaki (2020) and Dreamweavers II (2026). His own published biography and CV also list American musicians he has performed and recorded with, including Donny McCaslin, Ambrose Akinmusire, Shabaka Hutchings, Josh Johnson, Michael Blake, Jason Lindner, Steve Cardenas, Antonio Sanchez, Zach Danziger and Tim Lefebvre; of these, only Lefebvre's credit could be independently confirmed at the Discogs release level, on the 2024 trio album Hypersphere (Freecom Hub) led by Paolo Cattaneo - a Rock/post-punk/krautrock record, not a jazz release. Alongside his jazz work, Lombardini runs a long-running post-noise project, Buñuel, with vocalist Eugene Robinson (Killers Like Us, 2022; Mansuetude, 2024), and leads or co-leads several other electric-bass-centered groups, including The Framers, poL0 (with saxophonist Paolo Porta) and Em4ncipation. In Italian pop and rock he has worked as a session player and, for singer Annalisa, as musical director, and has recorded with Francesco Renga, Malika Ayane, Mario Biondi, Red Canzian and Erica Mou - the Red Canzian rhythm-section credit is independently corroborated by Italian Wikipedia's article on Canzian.

Lombardini teaches electric bass at the Conservatorio "Arrigo Boito" in Parma and at Siena Jazz University, per his official biography published by Siena Jazz.

Lombardini's playing runs across genuinely distinct registers rather than settling into one lane. His C.A.M. Jazz leader dates favor small, acoustic-leaning trios built around unusual timbral pairings - Diminuendo's serpent, tuba, colascione and piano/drums instrumentation, or SPL's acoustic bass and live electronics against a guest Hammond chair - leaning toward Post-Bop and chamber-scaled improvisation. His ongoing partnership with Mark de Clive-Lowe and Tommaso Cappellato works a different, groove-centered vein of broken beat and Soul Jazz, closer to de Clive-Lowe's own long career in that idiom, and touches Nu Jazz on the more electronic-leaning Dreamweavers II. A third, non-jazz register runs in parallel: the noise-rock project Buñuel and the post-punk trio behind Hypersphere, alongside a session and musical-directing career in Italian pop with artists including Annalisa, Malika Ayane and Mario Biondi. That range is consistent with how he describes himself in his own official CV - "bassista specializzato in contesti di musica improvvisata" (a bassist specialized in improvised-music contexts) - sought for timbral versatility across genres rather than a single stylistic identity.