Domenico Riina is a Palermo-based trumpeter, conductor, arranger and composer who has spent his entire career inside the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana (OJS), the big band run by Palermo's Brass Group Foundation and, per the Foundation's own materials, Italy's first and only permanent jazz orchestra with public-institution backing. He was a founding member of the orchestra, holding the first-trumpet and soloist chair until 2009, and has served as OJS's Resident Conductor since 2015 - a title the Brass Group Foundation itself bestowed on him that year.

His training runs on two parallel tracks that later merged in his career. On the jazz side, he earned a jazz music degree from the Conservatorio "Vincenzo Bellini" of Palermo in 2004 under Ignazio Garsia, the conservatory teacher who had founded OJS itself in the early 1970s (as the "Brass Group Big Band," per the Foundation's own history). On the classical side, he completed a diploma in orchestral conducting in Pescara in 2010 under Donato Renzetti, and served as Renzetti's assistant director from 2009 to 2010, including work on a production of Verdi's Rigoletto at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma; he has also conducted the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana in a program of Rossini and Mozart.

Riina's move from the OJS trumpet section into a conducting and arranging role at the orchestra's own podium is independently documented on record. On 2007's Music & Wine Live - a Sicilian winery-and-orchestra crossover project pairing the Donnafugata label with the Brass Group and visiting American musicians Eliot Zigmund (drums) and Bill Moring (bass) - Riina is credited as one of three arrangers/conductors, alongside fellow Brass Group conductors Antonino Pedone and Vito Giordano, and he also appears on trumpet in the orchestra's brass section.

His large-scale productions, before and after his 2015 appointment as Resident Conductor, include: in July 2009 he directed and arranged Three Drums Show, a world-premiere production at the Brass Group's Teatro di Verdura pairing visiting drummers Peter Erskine and Alex Acuña with young Sicilian drummer Gianluca Pellerito and the OJS; in 2012 he served as musical director for a "Tribute to Burt Bacharach" program, also at Teatro di Verdura; and in 2013 he composed "Suite per archi, fiati e percussioni 'Dear Mr. Zappa,'" written for the documentary film Summer '82 When Zappa Came to Sicily. In 2017 he directed the orchestras for a production titled "Sicily All Stars."

As Resident Conductor, Riina now leads OJS across the orchestra's full performing calendar, most visibly at the annual Sicilia Jazz Festival the Brass Group Foundation runs in Palermo. Italian press coverage of these festival dates and other OJS concerts credits him conducting the orchestra behind a long list of visiting artists spanning jazz and beyond - among them Richard Galliano, Martial Solal, Stefano Bollani, Francesco Cafiso, Ron Carter, Kurt Elling, Billy Cobham, Gregory Porter, John Pizzarelli, Wayne Bergeron, Tony Hadley and Eliane Elias, the last of whom closed the 2025 Sicilia Jazz Festival with OJS at Teatro di Verdura on 6 July 2025. These are institutional, orchestra-led festival and concert credits reported in event listings and press coverage rather than session-by-session discography entries, and this profile treats them accordingly: real and repeatedly documented, but not each one independently confirmed at a personnel-credit level the way the 2007 Donnafugata recording is.

Alongside his conducting work, Riina teaches jazz trumpet at the Conservatorio "Vincenzo Bellini" of Palermo and teaches orchestration and arrangement at the Scuola Superiore di Musica, the Brass Group Foundation's own music school - passing on, in the classroom, the same combination of jazz-orchestra and classical-conducting training that shaped his own career.

Riina's musical identity was built as a section player and soloist inside a working jazz orchestra before it became a conductor's identity, and his career keeps both halves visibly in play. His jazz-side training under OJS founder Ignazio Garsia and a decade as the orchestra's first trumpet gave him a big-band musician's ear from the inside of the section; his later conducting study under Donato Renzetti, including assistant work on opera, brought him the symphonic podium discipline that now lets OJS's own materials describe him as versatile "from symphonic to pop and jazz." That versatility is the throughline of his post-2015 programming as Resident Conductor: a big-band jazz repertoire sits alongside pop-songbook tribute programs (Bacharach), film-adjacent orchestral composition (the Zappa documentary suite), and guest slots for artists well outside jazz proper (Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet), all fielded by the same orchestra under his direction.