Dimitri Grechi Espinoza was born in Moscow in 1965. His mother's first marriage was to a Peruvian man named Espinoza; her second was to an Italian, Grechi, from Livorno, and the double surname carries both. Dimitri moved to Livorno with his mother at age five and has called Tuscany home ever since, while keeping close ties to his Orthodox and Moscow origins - press profiles routinely describe him as "the Tuscan saxophonist of Russian origin." He came to the saxophone comparatively late, picking it up at eighteen through blues music under two local mentors, Mimmo "Wild" Mollica of the Blues Harbour and a neighbor, Luigi Benedetti, and worked Italy's blues-club circuit for years afterward alongside guitarist Nick Beccattini. Around 1990 he spent close to a year in the United States, based between Chicago and New York, immersing himself in jazz and blues and taking classes at Jazz Mobile; back in Italy he went further with his jazz training at Mauro Liperini's Blues Club and through the Marchetti family's big band in Livorno, before completing advanced professional courses at the Siena Jazz national academy under saxophonist Pietro Tonolo, bassist Furio Di Castri, pianist Stefano Battaglia and trumpeter Paolo Fresu - a training generation whose imprint runs through the rest of his career.

Two of those teaching relationships left a Discogs-documented trace. Espinoza plays saxophone in the full fourteen-piece lineup of Battaglia's Siena Jazz-produced large ensemble, Stefano Battaglia Theatrum, on its first two albums, Gesti and Rito Stagionale (both recorded June 1997 in Livorno, released 1998 and 2000 on Splasc(h)). He is also credited as a composer - "Milvo," under the byline "D. Espinoza" - on Luna Park (2000, EGEA), a session billed to Tonolo, clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi and four other musicians; Espinoza does not appear as a performer on that specific release.

In 2000 Espinoza founded his own long-running vehicle, Dinamitri Jazz Folklore, built around jazz improvisation crossed with African and Eastern European folk material. The group's Discogs-documented catalog runs from Vita Nova (2000, Philology) through Folklore In Black, with guest clarinetist Tony Scott (2003, Caligola), Congo Evidence, with vocalist Sadiq Bey (2006, Caligola), La Società Delle Maschere (2012, Rudi Records) and Live In Sant'Anna Arresi 2013 (recorded 2013, released 2016, Rudi Records), both featuring the American poet Amiri Baraka, and ExWide - Live (2017, Caligola); baritone saxophonist Beppe Scardino, already profiled on this project, is a Discogs-confirmed member across the Congo Evidence, La Società Delle Maschere, Live In Sant'Anna Arresi 2013 and ExWide line-ups, and again on the successor unit Dinamitri Open Combo's Mappe Per L'Eden (2021, Felmay). In 2014 Musica Jazz's own critics' poll placed Dinamitri Jazz Folklore second among Italian groups. The group's research grew directly out of field experience: in August 2001, as a cultural ambassador for the city of Livorno, Espinoza played the Panafrican Festival in Brazzaville, Congo, and from 2002 to 2003 he studied African healing-music traditions with Goma Parfait Ludovic, director of the Congolese performance company Yela wa. That thread continued in 2011 at Mali's Festival au Désert and through the 2012-2014 "Azalai - Carovana Musicale" touring project; press profiles also credit him with festival-level encounters with Tuareg and Berber musicians (Tartit, Bombino) and Malian artists (Samba Touré, Afel Bocoum) - real, widely reported live connections that, unlike the Dinamitri Jazz Folklore credits above, carry no individual Discogs release credit and are reported here as press-documented rather than session-verified.

Espinoza also built a session and co-leader catalog outside his own group. In 2004, in Barga, he played alto saxophone in Orchestra BargaJazz under the direction of bassist Bruno Tommaso, already profiled on this project, backing the American saxophonist Lee Konitz on BargaLee BargaJazz_03 (Philology). The same year, in Livorno, he co-founded the musicians' association Axe with Scardino and percussionist Simone Padovani. His first outing as a billed leader, Artistic Alternative Music (2005, Caligola), was a quartet with bassist Piero Leveratto and drummer Filippo Monico; a year later a much larger ensemble billed as Dimitri Grechi Espinoza Artistic Alternative recorded Tutto Quello Che Avreste Voluto Sentire Dal Jazz E Che Non Avete Mai Osato Chiedere (2006, Rai Trade) for Italian public radio, with a personnel roster - confirmed at the Discogs release-credit level - that includes Scardino (baritone sax), double bassist Antonio Borghini, already profiled on this project, plus Rossano Emili, Pierluigi Bastioli, Gabrio Baldacci, Alessandro Riccucci, Paolo Botti and Emanuele Parrini. In parallel he recorded two duo albums with double bassist Tito Mangialajo Rantzer, When We Forget The Melody (2011) and When We Forget The Melody Vol. 2 (2014, both Rudi Records, Discogs-tagged Free Jazz), and worked as one-quarter of the standards-repertoire quartet behind guitarist Massimo Minardi on Are U Standard? (2011, Radio SNJ Records), a group that also played festivals including Sestri In Jazz (2009) and the Brianza Open Jazz Festival (2010). A differently configured quartet using a near-identical title, Are You Standard? (2021, Caligola), billed jointly to guitarist Roberto Cecchetto, drummer Alessandro Fabbri, Espinoza and pianist Stefano Onorati, is a separate, later recording.

From the mid-2010s Espinoza turned increasingly toward unaccompanied saxophone as its own statement, under the umbrella title OREB - "the study of sacred science in traditional cultures" paired with acoustic research into the spaces where he plays. Its three chapters, all on Ponderosa Music & Art, are Angel's Blows (recorded 2014, released 2015) and ReCreatio (recorded 2016, released 2017), both taped in Livorno's Cisternino di Pian di Rota, and The Spiritual Way (recorded February 13, 2019, released 2020), taped in the Baptistery of Pisa. The OREB performances themselves have travelled to some of Europe's most resonant rooms, among them the Pantheon in Rome, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the Church of the Pietà in Venice, St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh and Notre-Dame d'Espérance in Paris. He returned to solo saxophone for Love Is a Losing Game (2023, Ponderosa), a set of jazz standards - "Summertime," "In a Sentimental Mood," "Little Sunflower" among them - that also carries a duo track, "La Ilaha Illallah," with percussionist and vocalist Saïd Tichiti, a collaborator he has continued to perform with, including a 2024 duo date, TÜR, at Pisa Jazz. In 2024 he joined a Finnish-Italian quintet - guitarist Jukka Orma, reedist Pepa Päivinen, bassist Ville Rauhala, drummer Simo Laihonen - for Albert Ayler Reawakened (Eclipse Music), a set of reworked Albert Ayler compositions. His most recent album, Meditation On A Love Supreme (recorded November 2025 at EXWide, Pisa, released March 2026 on Ponderosa), is a direct, explicitly dated tribute: a trio with Turkish ney and bendir player Aziz Şenol Filiz and double bassist Guido Zorn, marking the 2026 centenary of John Coltrane's birth with a version of Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and featuring American flutist James Newton as a guest on its opening movement, "Part I Psalm." That record makes explicit a lineage press coverage has attached to Espinoza for years - one description calls him among the few classically jazz-trained saxophonists to have inherited Coltrane's search for a spiritual sound and carried it forward as sustained, independent research rather than homage alone.

Espinoza's catalog runs two genuinely distinct tracks that meet at the saxophone itself. One is an ensemble, groove-and-improvisation practice - Dinamitri Jazz Folklore's African-and-Eastern-European folkloric jazz, the standards-repertoire quartets, the Ayler tribute - documented by Discogs under Jazz and, on the Mangialajo Rantzer duo records, specifically Free Jazz. The other is OREB, an unaccompanied, site-specific saxophone practice built around what he calls the acoustic and spiritual properties of sacred architecture; Discogs tags its records Contemporary Jazz, but the more exact description is the vault's own Spiritual Jazz. Meditation On A Love Supreme sits deliberately between the two registers: a trio, not a solo record, but one whose stated frame - a hundred-year-later reading of Coltrane's own spiritual-jazz landmark, voiced partly through Middle Eastern instrumentation - draws the two threads of his work as close together as they have come. Running under both tracks is the ethnographic curiosity that sent him to Brazzaville in 2001 and to the Sahara a decade later: an "Ethno Jazz" thread of African and Tuareg/Berber influence that, in his own account, is less a stylistic flourish than the same search for "inner sound" he pursues alone in a baptistery.