Dino Betti van der Noot was born September 18, 1936, in Rapallo, on the Ligurian coast; his mother and a cousin were both classical pianists, the household's first source of music. He studied at the Scuola Musicale of Pavia from 1946 to 1951, took private lessons in Milan in 1959, and studied again at Berklee College of Music in the 1970s. He led combos in Italy from 1957 to 1960, then stepped away from active musicianship for most of the 1960s while building a separate career at B Communications, a Milan advertising agency he has chaired for decades - jazz has always been the second half of a double life, not the first.

He returned to bandleading with an amateur big band from 1969 to 1972. A live recording from that group's later work, taped in Milan in February and March 1977 and issued in 1978 as Basement Big Band, is his earliest Discogs-documented credit as a bandleader - listed as "Leader, Arranged By" on a release billed to the group name rather than his own. He formed a professional big band in 1982, and his true recording debut as a billed leader, A Midwinter Night's Dream, followed in 1983 on the independent Five Record label, with clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi and reedman Hugo Heredia in the section.

The mid-1980s brought him to Soul Note, the Italian label that anchored a generation of European and American jazz recording, and to his most internationally attended period. Here Comes Springtime (1985) and They Cannot Know (1987) - both Soul Note releases, both Musica Jazz Critics' Poll Record of the Year - carried large, specifically assembled personnel: Franco Ambrosetti on flugelhorn, Donald Harrison on alto and soprano saxophone, bassist Bob Cunningham and drummer Daniel Humair on the first; saxophonist Bill Evans (the reed player and EWI specialist, not the pianist of the same name), drummer Danny Gottlieb, trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, bassist Mark Egan and vocalist Carmen Lundy on the second, alongside returning regulars Trovesi, Heredia, Luis Agudo and Tiziano Tononi. Nat Hentoff wrote the liner notes for Here Comes Springtime; Ira Gitler wrote them for They Cannot Know. The same stretch put his professional big band in front of American audiences and critics for the first time, generating substantial US press coverage cited in the Wikipedia bibliography for this period - Down Beat and Cadence (both February 1987), The Boston Globe (November 1986), USA Today (December 1986) and a September 8, 1987 New York Times piece - culminating in a 1987 New York City engagement. Two further Soul Note albums, A Chance for a Dance (1987-88) and Space Blossoms (1988-89), rounded out the decade; 1989 brought him a second Musica Jazz Record of the Year, a Dischi Critics' Poll Record of the Year, and a Record of the Decade citation from both polls.

A long recording gap followed - sixteen years between Space Blossoms and his next album - before Ithaca/Ithaki (2005, Soul Note) reintroduced him with an expanded, more international band: bassist Ares Tavolazzi on electric bass, pianist John Taylor, drummer Famoudou Don Moye, harpist Vincenzo Zitello, vibraphonist Andrea Dulbecco, saxophonist Sandro Cerino, trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, vocalist Joyce Yuille, and Trovesi again on clarinet and saxophone; the cover art was by Allegra Betti van der Noot, a family collaborator. From The Humming Cloud (2007) onward he settled into a stable working orchestra that, with some turnover, carried him through the next two decades: trumpeter Alberto Mandarini joined for September's New Moon (2011) and remained a fixture through Let Us Recount Our Dreams (2023), alongside violinist Emanuele Parrini, reedman Giulio Visibelli, bassist Gianluca Alberti, vibraphonist Luca Gusella, drummer Stefano Bertoli, and Cerino, Tononi and Zitello continuing from the earlier band. The Stuff Dreams Are Made On (2013) and Notes Are But Wind (2015) each earned him a further Musica Jazz Record of the Year, on top of Jazz Composer of the Year honors in 2007 and 2009. His most recent solo album is Let Us Recount Our Dreams (2023, Audissea), and his most recent Discogs-documented activity of any kind is a single new composition, "Lullaby for a Lion," contributed to violinist Mario Mariotti's various-composers tribute album La Persistance du Rêve (2024, Abeat Records) - a new piece of writing at 87 or 88 years old.

Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler's Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1999) also credits him, across his bands over the years, with the American musicians Paul Bley, Paul Motian and Steve Swallow, along with vibraphonist David Friedman - names that do not appear in the Discogs session data available for this build (personnel is not catalogued at all for A Chance for a Dance or Space Blossoms, the two records where such credits would most likely sit) and so are reported here as an encyclopedia-documented fact about his broader circle rather than a session-verified one.

Feather and Gitler's own description remains the clearest summary of his writing: "His compositions are narratives rife with colour, ranging from the boldest hues to the most subtle and revealing a sensitive, inventive melodist and lapidarian master of orchestral skills." He does not perform as an instrumentalist on his own records - every Discogs credit across four decades reads Composer, Arranger, Conductor or Producer - and his catalog is built the way a film composer's might be: large, specifically voiced ensembles (strings and harp alongside the standard big-band brass and reeds on several records), through-composed pieces rather than head-solos-head arrangements, and recurring literary and pictorial titles (Ithaca/Ithaki, after Cavafy; Let Us Recount Our Dreams; The Silence of the Broken Lute). Discogs tags his catalog "Big Band" and "Avant-Garde Jazz" throughout, with individual releases also carrying its "Contemporary Jazz" style label - not part of this site's canonical taxonomy, but consistent with the more exact house term Orchestral Jazz for large-ensemble, extended-composition writing in the Gil Evans/Maria Schneider lineage that his catalog most resembles.