Antonio Onorato was born January 13, 1964, in Aquilonia, a small town in Avellino province, and grew up in the shadow of Vesuvius in Torre del Greco, near Naples, where he picked up the guitar at age six. He studied with the Italian jazz guitarist Eddy Palermo and later attended workshops led by Jim Hall, Mick Goodrick, Pat Metheny and John Scofield; Scofield is quoted in Onorato's own biography as having told him, "I would have liked to play the guitar when I was twenty like you play it."

His recorded career opens with Gaga (1990), and across more than three decades and roughly 30 leader releases he has pursued a single, consistent project: fusing the harmonic and melodic language of Neapolitan song with Afro-American jazz, Brazilian and Middle Eastern music, and, on several albums, Native American themes, a synthesis he and his own press call "Neapolitan Jazz." A trained student of ethnomusicology, he built early albums such as South Winds (1996, PoloSud) and Jazz Napoletano (2004, Wide Sound / Che Guevara Recordings) around that language, and has continued it on more recent work including Napule's Power (2023, ARTIS Records) and Neapolitan Avantgarde (2025, Guitar Angel Music). He also developed a distinctive voice on the breath-controlled Yamaha G10 guitar synthesizer, which he calls the breath guitar and which he plays by managing dynamics through a mouth-controller rather than a pick or fingers alone; his own site describes him as the only musician who performs on the instrument in this way.

Onorato is one of a small number of Italian jazz musicians to have led his own concert at the Blue Note in New York (2005). In 2002 he took part in a peace delegation and concert in Baghdad ahead of the Iraq war, a trip documented on the various-artists compilation Il Cielo Sopra Baghdad / L'altra Faccia Della Guerra (2003, Helikonia), on which he appears. He has also written music for film and television, including the independent feature In fila per due.

Onorato's catalog includes a run of duo and small-group records with other name jazz players. Two Parallel Colours (2008) reunited him on record with his own teacher, Eddy Palermo, alongside bassist Dario Deidda and drummer Giampiero Virtuoso. Antonio Onorato & Franco Cerri (2016, Abeat Records) is a full studio duo album with Franco Cerri, already profiled on this site: the two guitarists trade jazz standards (Jobim's "Corcovado," Ellington's "Take the A Train," "Body and Soul") and a Neapolitan classic, "Munasterio 'e Santa Chiara," backed by Simone Serafini on double bass and Luca Colussi on drums. A parallel Brazilian-Neapolitan axis runs through From Napoli to Belo Horizonte (recorded from 2010, issued 2013 on the digital services and 2015 on CD per Discogs), a duo album with Brazilian guitarist and Milton Nascimento collaborator Toninho Horta, begun a decade after the two first met in 2000. More recently, The New Bridge (2021, Blu Music International) paired him with American bassist Gerald Cannon - a Wynton Marsalis and McCoy Tyner alumnus - and drummer Mario De Paola in what the label's own billing called "a bridge between Naples and New York." In 2018 he founded the Italian Jazz Guitars project with fellow guitarists Gigi Cifarelli and Fabio Mariani.

Onorato's own Discogs artist biography also names ECM-associated Norwegian drummer Paolo Vinaccia, trumpeter Enrico Rava, already profiled on this site, and Ivorian ethno-jazz drummer Paco Sery among his collaborators, alongside Italian names Pino Daniele, James Senese and Tullio De Piscopo. The most substantial of these is Vinaccia, with whom Onorato recorded a "Native Spirits" session on the 2009 double album Emmanuel and performed in a duo captured on video as "Space Jazz."

The great majority of Onorato's Discogs-cataloged releases carry "Jazz" as their listed genre, with "Fusion," "Latin Jazz" and "Contemporary Jazz" the recurring style tags - South Winds (1996), Tudo Azul (2007), Two Parallel Colours (2008), Angelus (2012), Antonio Onorato & Franco Cerri (2016, additionally tagged "Free Jazz") and Napule's Power (2023) among them. A smaller side current in his catalog leans further into world and blues idioms rather than straight jazz - Native Angels (2018, a collaboration built around Native American vocalist Bo Koinva) and Vesuvio Blues (2017) are both Discogs-tagged "Blues" alone, and Mater Lucania (2013) and Quatro Linguas Uma Alma (2006) lean into "Folk, World & Country" and, on the latter, "Pop." These are a minority of his output and read as extensions of the same fusion project into new vocabularies - Native American, blues, world song - rather than a separate commercial-pop career; no body of Neapolitan neomelodic or schlager-style pop work was found anywhere in his discography. His playing draws on Wes Montgomery-to-Metheny-and-Scofield jazz-guitar vocabulary layered over the melodic contours of Neapolitan song, a hybrid he has pursued consistently since his earliest albums rather than adopted for any one project.