Bruno Biriaco was born in Rome on May 29, 1949. He began music young, studying piano and composition, and by his teens was playing drums in local rock bands and competitions; his earliest Discogs-documented studio credit is a 1969 pop single session behind singer Orietta Berti. In the early 1970s he moved into jazz proper, working through Rome's session and club scene with the Quintetto Santucci-Scoppa - trumpeter Cicci Santucci and tenor saxophonist Enzo Scoppa - and building a reputation as a first-call drummer.

His most consequential credit from this period came in 1972, when double bassist Giovanni Tommaso - recently departed from a staff-session career at RCA Italiana and newly inspired by Miles Davis's Bitches Brew - assembled a quintet at his own apartment on Via Beato Angelico in Rome: pianist Franco D'Andrea, saxophonist Claudio Fasoli, guitarist Tony Sidney, and Biriaco on drums. The group took the name Perigeo and became, across five studio albums for RCA Italiana between 1972 and 1977 (Azimut, Abbiamo Tutti Un Blues Da Piangere, Genealogia, La Valle Dei Templi, and Non È Poi Così Lontano, the last also issued in the US as Fata Morgana), the definitive document of Italian jazz-rock: Discogs tags Azimut itself "Jazz," "Rock," "Jazz-Rock," "Fusion," and "Prog Rock." Perigeo toured beyond Italy, including a date at the Montreux Casino, and its catalog has stayed in circulation since, repackaged by Sony/RCA as Antologia in 2014 and reunited for a one-off concert in Florence in July 2019.

Alongside Perigeo, Biriaco built a parallel career as a first-call drummer for visiting American soloists on Rome's Horo Records, the label behind the "Jazz A Confronto" ("Jazz Face to Face") live-in-studio series. He is Discogs-credited on drums on Jazz A Confronto 4 (1973), billed to trombonist Frank Rosolino and also featuring pianists Enrico Pieranunzi and Franco D'Andrea, bassist Bruno Tommaso, and saxophonist Gianni Basso, and on Jazz A Confronto 10 (1974), billed to tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin alongside D'Andrea and Giovanni Tommaso - a session later reissued on CD by Atomic Jazz in 2009, one of the few titles in Horo's 30-plus-volume series to receive one. That same year, 1973, he is separately Discogs-credited on drums on Giorgio Gaslini's Favola Pop Reportage Da "L'Isola Di Utopia" (Produttori Associati), alongside alto saxophonist Massimo Urbani. Two years later he played on the Rome-recorded tracks - the title track and "Giromondo" - of Enrico Rava's three-lineup album Pupa O Crisalide (1975, Vista), whose other two lineups were recorded in Buenos Aires and New York, the latter with Jack DeJohnette and John Abercrombie.

Multiple biographical sources - Italian Wikipedia, the Saint Louis College of Music jazz archive in Rome, and 2025 festival press coverage from Anagni Jazz Fest - additionally credit Biriaco with festival and performance collaborations with Chet Baker, saxophonists Bob Berg and George Coleman, and trombonist Slide Hampton during the same period. A compilation DVD, Chet Baker: In Italy (2009, JazzShots), does carry a Discogs drums credit for Biriaco across a multi-date anthology spanning 1976 and 1987-88 performances, though Discogs does not break the credit down by individual track and a second drummer (Charles Saudrais) is credited on the same release, so the specific performance featuring Biriaco cannot be confirmed from the data alone. No Discogs release credit could be found connecting Biriaco to Bob Berg or Lee Konitz specifically, despite both names recurring in the same biographical summaries; both are noted here as an unconfirmed claim rather than a verified credit.

After Perigeo's run ended, Biriaco founded Saxes Machine in 1978: an octet built around three rhythm players (himself on drums, plus bass and piano) and five saxophones, debuting that January at Rome's St. Louis Club and going on to appear at Belgium's Middelheim Jazz Festival and Warsaw's Jazz Jamboree. Its sole studio album, Nouami (1978, EDIPAN), credits Biriaco as arranger, conductor, and drummer, features Franco D'Andrea and Giovanni Tommaso among its personnel, and carries liner notes from Enrico Pieranunzi. The project proved durable: Biriaco revived Saxes Machine for its 40th-anniversary concert at Bari's Teatro Petruzzelli in July 2021, and it was still touring in July 2025, when Anagni Jazz Fest presented Biriaco with a career-achievement award alongside a Saxes Machine performance.

From 1977 to 1987, Biriaco taught drums and ensemble music at the Siena Jazz summer seminars, the school founded by Franco Caroni that became one of Italy's most influential jazz teaching institutions of the era. His later career moved further into arranging and conducting: he founded the Galaxy Big Band in the early 2000s, conducted the Abruzzese Symphony Orchestra, composed for film, and worked from 1983 onward as an orchestra director for RAI, Italian state television, on a run of variety programs - the source of the only Wikimedia Commons photograph of him, a still captured from one such broadcast.

Biriaco's career runs through several distinct rooms of Italian music without fully leaving any of them. As Perigeo's founding drummer he helped define Italian jazz-rock/fusion at its most muscular, while his parallel session work for Horo Records placed him in a more conservative, straight-ahead post-bop setting built around visiting American soloists such as Frank Rosolino and Johnny Griffin, alongside fellow Italians Enrico Pieranunzi and Franco D'Andrea. A third strand runs through Giorgio Gaslini's more exploratory, avant-garde-adjacent orbit on Favola Pop Reportage. After Perigeo, that range turned into an arranging-and-conducting career rather than a continued run of leader albums: Saxes Machine's five-saxophone-plus-rhythm format was itself a compositional choice as much as a performing one, and it set up the second half of his career, split between big-band leadership (Saxes Machine, the Galaxy Big Band), orchestral conducting (the Abruzzese Symphony Orchestra, RAI television), and a full decade teaching the next generation of Italian drummers at Siena Jazz.