Edgardo Moroni, known as Dado, was born in Genoa on 20 October 1962 and put his hands on a piano at four. His parents' record shelf did the first part of the teaching: Fats Waller, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum and Erroll Garner, learned by ear before anyone corrected his fingering. At eleven he was handed to the Genoa pianist Flavio Crivelli, who moved him forward about thirty years in one step, into Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal and Oscar Peterson.

By fourteen he was working paid gigs around Italy. At seventeen he made a record. Jazz Piano came out on the Genoa label Dire in 1980, with Tullio De Piscopo on drums and the Louisiana bassist Julius Farmer, then several years into a long stretch of working in Italy, on electric bass. The sleeve carries a credit that has nothing to do with the music: Franco Cerri, the country's most established jazz guitarist, listed as the record's presenter. Italy's senior figure had put his name behind a teenager's first album.

A 1979 meeting with the Swiss-Italian flugelhornist Franco Ambrosetti opened the rest of Europe. Ambrosetti appears on the follow-up, Bluesology (Dire, 1981), alongside the Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and De Piscopo again. Through the 1980s Moroni worked European festivals and clubs, including a long residency in the trio of former Duke Ellington bassist Jimmy Woode at the Widder Bar in Zurich.

Two things happened in 1987. He sat on the jury of the first Thelonious Monk international piano competition at the Smithsonian Institution, at twenty-four. And Ron Carter brought him to Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, produced the session, played bass on it, and put Grady Tate on drums and Gene Bertoncini on guitar. EmArcy released it in 1988 as Ron Carter Presents Dado Moroni. That same year Moroni joined Ray Brown and Pierre Boussaguet in a trio called Two Bass Hits.

He moved to New York in 1991 and worked the Blue Note, Birdland and the Village Vanguard. In 1995 Ray Brown assembled Some of My Best Friends Are... The Piano Players and staffed it with Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal, Benny Green, Geoff Keezer and Moroni. The same period produced his own trio records for Jazz Focus, Insights (1995), which he also produced, and Out of the Night (1999).

The Italian catalogue never paused while this was happening. He recorded the piano duo Live Conversations with Enrico Pieranunzi in 2006, and he is the pianist on Roberto Gatto's Deep (CAM Jazz, 2003) and Rosario Giuliani's Anything Else (Dreyfus Jazz, 2006). In 2009 he made SoloDado for Abeat Records, alone at the piano and producing himself, and the Top Jazz referendum run by Musica Jazz named him best Italian jazz pianist that year. In 2010 the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Turin gave him its jazz piano chair, which he still holds, and Resonance Records recorded him at Rising Jazz Stars Studios in Beverly Hills with Marco Panascia on bass and Peter Erskine on drums.

In 2014 Abeat Records released Barber Shop: Franco Cerri on guitar, Dado Moroni on piano, Riccardo Fioravanti on double bass, Stefano Bagnoli on drums. The man who had presented a seventeen-year-old's debut in 1980 was now the leader of the band Moroni played in. They made a sequel in 2016, Barber Shop 2. Novant'anni suonati!, for Cerri's ninetieth year.

He has kept the pace since. Five for John (2014) is a John Coltrane tribute with Alvin Queen and Joe Locke; Two for Duke (2012) and Two for Stevie (2014) are duos with saxophonist Max Ionata; Kind of Bill (2017) puts him with Eddie Gomez and Joe La Barbera on Bill Evans repertoire. Close Together, eight tracks of duo with the French trumpeter Stéphane Belmondo recorded live at the Jazz en Tête festival in Clermont-Ferrand on 23 October 2025, was released on 29 May 2026 by Space Time Records. His trio played Teatro Ristori in Verona on 21 December 2025.

Discogs credits him on 161 releases, 53 of them as main artist.

Moroni is a bebop-rooted mainstream pianist whose vocabulary was assembled in two layers. The first is stride and swing piano absorbed by ear as a child: Waller, Hines, Wilson, Tatum, Garner. The second arrived through Flavio Crivelli at eleven, and it is the modern one: Parker and Powell for line, Bill Evans for harmony, Ahmad Jamal for space, Oscar Peterson for the sheer physical command of the instrument. Those two layers explain a player who can sustain an unaccompanied solo record like SoloDado and also drive a hard-swinging trio without any loss of momentum.

The rhythmic and harmonic conception is the reason American bandleaders kept hiring him rather than treating him as a visiting European. Ron Carter, Ray Brown, Clark Terry and Peter Erskine all put him in rhythm sections where the standard was set by players who had defined it. His duo work, a format he has returned to repeatedly with Pieranunzi, Max Ionata, Franco Ambrosetti and Stéphane Belmondo, is where the harmonic side is most exposed, since there is no rhythm section to lean on.