Davide Sgarra is an Italian jazz clarinetist and saxophonist, born and raised near Varese in northern Italy and now based in Brooklyn, New York. His path into music started early and locally: a first clarinet lesson at age 12, a first jazz lesson at 15, and a formative moment hearing Henghel Gualdi's "Jazz Band" and performing that same chart with his hometown band. He has described those early experiences as a "deep connection with the sound of the clarinet and the music," a feeling he calls thoughtless and grounded.

He left Italy to train professionally, earning a Bachelor of Music at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague in the Netherlands, where his teachers included saxophonists John Ruocco and Chris Cheek and clarinetist/saxophonist Benjamin Herman. He went on to a Master of Music at Manhattan School of Music in New York, studying with saxophonists Donny McCaslin and Mark Shim. Along the way he also studied with Italian jazz clarinetist Alfredo Ferrario, one of the few players working in the same New Orleans clarinet tradition Sgarra has made his specialty.

Since settling in New York, Sgarra has become a regular presence on the city's traditional-jazz circuit, performing at venues including Birdland Jazz Club, Dizzy's Club, the Perelman Performing Arts Center, Arthur's Tavern, and Winnie's Jazz Club. He counts Birdland as his favorite stage, having played there twice with tuba player David Ostwald's group; he has singled out the room's acoustics, strong enough in the downstairs theatre that a band can go unmiked and still let every player's individual tone come through clearly. Beyond Ostwald, he has worked with bandleaders and ensembles including pianist Gordon Webster, pianist Rob van Bavel, banjoist/vocalist Terry Waldo, bassist Jeremy Davis, the Fabulous Equinox Orchestra, and trumpeter Drew Nugent's Midnight Society, and appeared with a septet of fellow New York trad-jazz players — Andrew Stephens, Sam Chess, Jay Rattman, Brennen Ernst, Devan Kortan, and Riley Baker — for a Louis Armstrong Hot Five tribute at the Hot Club of New York in November 2025.

Since 2021 he has also toured internationally, performing in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Romania in addition to his New York work. The highest-profile of these engagements came in December 2023, when he appeared as a guest soloist with the Concertgebouw Jazz Orchestra in Amsterdam for a "Dutch Jazz Heritage" concert dedicated to Sonny Rollins, performed at the Concertgebouw Theatre. Alongside performing, he teaches woodwinds privately and in New York City schools.

As of mid-2026, Sgarra has not yet released a recording under his own name. He has said he is planning to release an album with his own band, and is currently composing and arranging for it while continuing to perform regularly around New York, including recurring engagements with Terry Waldo's band and Drew Nugent's Midnight Society.

Sgarra plays inside the New Orleans clarinet tradition and the New York jazz of the 1930s and '40s, and describes wanting the clarinet to "sing" on everything from a ballad to a burning up-tempo number. He is especially drawn to ballads — citing "The Nearness of You," "It's Like Reaching for the Moon," and "Moonlight in Vermont" as favorites — for the room they give a player to dig into melody and expressiveness.

His clarinet influences run through the instrument's classic lineage: Johnny Dodds and Barney Bigard for early jazz vocabulary, and Tony Scott, Buddy DeFranco, and Eddie Daniels for later stylistic range. Beyond the clarinet itself, he names singer Billie Holiday, tenor saxophonists Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon and Lester Young, and trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison as his deepest musical inspirations — Holiday's recording of "It's Like Reaching for the Moon" in particular, which he cites as a lesson in melody and sound intensity. His desert-island picks are Holiday's Lady in Satin, Ben Webster and Harry "Sweets" Edison's Ben and Sweets, and the complete Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of Louis Armstrong. He sees the New Orleans and swing-era tradition as "a living, breathing language" rather than a museum piece, and views live performance and human connection with an audience as essential to keeping that music, and jazz generally, alive.