Antonino "Ninni" Pedone is a baritone saxophonist, clarinetist, composer, arranger and conductor who has spent more than four decades at the center of the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana (OJS), the big band run by Palermo's Brass Group Foundation and, per the Foundation's own materials, Italy's first and only permanent jazz orchestra with public-institution backing. He earned a clarinet diploma with the maximum score (10/10) from the Conservatorio di Palermo in 1982, later returned to the same conservatory for a jazz degree under OJS founder Ignazio Garsia, and went on to earn the title "Conductor of Jazz Orchestra" through a program of study with Gunther Schuller and Bill Russo.

He was a founding member of the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana when it took that name in 1984 - the Brass Group's own history traces the orchestra back to the "Brass Group Big Band" Garsia had led since the early 1970s - and he also co-founded two of its satellite ensembles, "I Solisti dell'O.J.S." and "Le Nouvel Ensemble Latin Group." His biography, published in near-identical form by the Brass Group itself and by his sheet-music publishers Scomegna and Allemanda, credits him as OJS's principal baritone saxophonist across an unbroken run of guest-conductor engagements that reads like a survey of postwar big-band jazz: Gil Evans, Francy Boland, Bob Brookmeyer, Carla Bley, Mel Lewis, Bob Wilber, Gunther Schuller, Giorgio Gaslini, Bruno Canfora, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sam Rivers, Ernie Wilkins, Archie Shepp and Paul Jeffrey are all named as directors he performed under with OJS from 1984 onward. These are institutional, orchestra-wide guest-conductor credits drawn from Pedone's own published biography and OJS's history rather than session-by-session discography entries, and this profile treats them accordingly - real and independently repeated across multiple primary sources, but not each individually confirmed at the personnel-credit level.

One of them is independently documented in full, however. In May 1989, OJS recorded an entire album of Carla Bley's compositions, newly re-orchestrated for big band by Jeff Friedman, at the Brass Group Jazz Club and Teatro Metropolitan in Palermo. Released the following year on Bley's own ECM-distributed imprint as Plays the Music of Carla Bley, the album's personnel list - published on ECM's own site - names Pedone on baritone saxophone (rendered "Antonio Pedone" there, a one-letter spelling variant this profile does not repeat) alongside guest artists Gary Valente (trombone) and Steve Swallow (bass). It matches Pedone's own published account of his career, which lists this record as his first: "1989: first album recording - Orchestra Jazz Siciliana plays the music of Carla Bley."

He returned to a session in a leadership role nearly two decades later. On 2007's Music & Wine Live - a Sicilian winery-and-orchestra crossover project pairing the Donnafugata label with the Brass Group and visiting American musicians Eliot Zigmund (drums) and Bill Moring (bass) - Pedone is credited as one of three arrangers/conductors, alongside fellow Brass Group conductors Domenico Riina and Vito Giordano, and also appears on saxophone.

Beyond those two Discogs-documented recordings, Pedone's institutional record with OJS runs long and continuous: the orchestra's national premiere of Duke Ellington's Queen's Suite under visiting conductor Bob Wilber in 1989, the European premiere of Charles Mingus's Epitaph in 1991, a first-place finish at Barga's International Composition and Arrangement Competition for Jazz Orchestra in 2001, his own orchestration and conducting of a world-premiere big-band arrangement of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in Palermo in 2011, and his appointment as the Brass Group Foundation's "Resident Composer" in 2015. He remains an active conductor of the orchestra: in June 2025 he directed OJS for bassist Victor Wooten's appearance at Palermo's Teatro di Verdura during the fifth Sicilia Jazz Festival, one of five rotating conductors fielded by the orchestra that year alongside Domenico Riina, Paolo Lepore, Vito Giordano and Piero Romano.

Separately from his jazz career, Pedone has taught in Italian secondary education since 1989 and composes for concert/wind band: published pieces including Celeste, Diana, Gioiosa, La Deposizione and I Remember Bill (2004) are catalogued by the Italian publishers Scomegna, Allemanda and Wicky, and by Italy's national library system, as concert-band repertoire rather than jazz.

Pedone's musical life has been built almost entirely inside one institution's book, not a series of personal leader projects, and that shows in the range of material he has played: the Brass Group's guest-conductor roster spans classic big-band swing (the Ellington premiere), postbop and avant-garde big-band writing (Mingus's Epitaph, Carla Bley's own compositions), and the classical-jazz crossover instincts associated with Gunther Schuller, under whom Pedone earned his own conducting credential - Schuller coined the term "Third Stream" for exactly that fusion. As a baritone saxophonist he has held a section-leader chair inside a large jazz orchestra rather than working as a small-group soloist, and his own compositional output splits cleanly into two separate lanes: arrangements and original writing for OJS's jazz book, and a parallel catalog of concert-band pieces for Italian wind ensembles that draws on an entirely different, non-jazz tradition.