Enzo Favata was born on November 17, 1956, in Alghero, on Sardinia's northwest coast, and grew up in working-class Alghero in the 1970s. By his own account, a neighbor's record collection put John Coltrane's My Favorite Things in front of him at about fifteen, and the saxophone followed. He has named Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Dave Liebman, Jan Garbarek and John Surman as the players who shaped him, studied classical and jazz saxophone, and later attended the Conservatorio di Cagliari, where he came across the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jon Hassell and Brian Eno. His professional career began in 1983.

His earliest Discogs-documented jazz record is Tangos De La Tardor (1989, LMJ Records), credited to the D.D. Band, on which he plays alto and soprano saxophone, shares arranging and writing credit with pianist Agostino Frassetto, and sits in a horn section with trumpeter Flavio Boltro. Italian Wikipedia adds that he formed a quartet in 1988 that debuted at the Sant'Anna Arresi Jazz Festival. Rather than stay in the mainstream, he then turned toward the folk music of his own island, and toward the wind instruments that carry it: over time he has assembled a collection of more than 140 instruments from around the world and, by his own description, says he pioneered the use of multi-effect processing on wind instruments in the late 1990s.

That turn produced Jana (1992, Edizioni Musicali Il Pontesonoro), his first album as a leader, recorded with guitarist Marcello Peghin, cellist Giovanni Macciocu and tabla player Rashmi V. Bhatt, with accordionist Antonello Salis guesting on three tracks and Sardinian singer Elena Ledda on two. In 1995 the Jana Project released Islà (New Tone Records), and Favata played soprano saxophone alongside trumpeter Paolo Fresu on the Sardinian folk group Cordas Et Cannas' Place Of Winds. The pivotal pair came in 1997: Ajò (New Tone Records), a quintet album recorded in November 1996 at the Teatro Civico in Alghero with Argentine bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi, and Voyage En Sardaigne (Il Manifesto / Felmay), recorded that summer with Saluzzi, launeddas master Luigi Lai, the Tenores Di Bitti and the Cuncordu Di Castelsardo choirs, and other Sardinian musicians. All About Jazz called the latter a genuine look into the island, folk in its materials but shaped by European jazz phrasing.

In 1999 he recorded Atlantico (Il Manifesto) in Sardinia with bandoneonist Daniele Di Bonaventura, guitarist Marcello Peghin, bassist Salvatore Maltana and percussionist Roberto Pellegrini, an album that also gave a working ensemble its name. Its members reappear on Made In Sardinia (2003), recorded in the Castello di Castelsardo with the Tenores Di Bitti and the Cuncordu Di Castelsardo, and on No Man's Land (2006, Splasc(h) Records), co-billed to Favata, Di Bonaventura, Peghin, Maltana, drummers Alfredo Laviano and U.T. Gandhi. Between them came Boghes And Voices - The Sacred Mystery Of Sardinia (2002, Symphonia), a direct-to-two-track recording made in an 11th-century church with accordionist Simone Zanchini and the Cuncordu Di Castelsardo. Since 2001 he has also been artistic director of Musica sulle Bocche, an annual festival spread across towns of northern Sardinia that he created.

The New Village (2007, Il Manifesto), by the Enzo Favata Tentetto with the Tenores Di Bitti, set Sardinian polyphonic singing against a jazz band that included clarinetist Daniele D'Agaro on one track; Mark Corroto's All About Jazz review described it as fusing traditional Sardinian vocals with the American jazz lexicon. Jeux D'Enfant (2008, Comar 23) followed as a co-led quartet with guitarist Maurizio Brunod, percussionist Massimo Barbiero and Di Bonaventura, then two small-group records on his own Isola Dei Suoni label, The Night Of The Storytellers (2009, with Peghin and bassist Yuri Goloubev) and Insulae (2011, a duo with Mario Crispi for archaic and classical winds and processors).

The later catalogue turns on a handful of long partnerships. Secret Window (2017, Hermes Records) is a trio with Peghin and bassist Salvatore Maiore. Inner Roads (2018, Jazzit Records), issued with the magazine JazzIt, pairs him with pianist Enrico Zanisi, bassist Danilo Gallo and U.T. Gandhi, with part of it recorded live in Belo Horizonte and Brasilia. Song Book No.1 (2019, Da Vinci Jazz) is a quartet of what he calls songs without words. As Glocal Report he recorded Live In Hong Kong (2020), captured at the Making Music Festival in June 2019 with pianist Alfonso Santimone, Gallo and Gandhi, and released as a self-issued digital album. The Crossing (2021, Niafunken) moved him toward electronics with vibraphonist Pasquale Mirra, electric bassist Rosa Brunello and drummer Marco Frattini. Os Caminhos De Garibaldi (2024, Caligola), a Garibaldi-themed album recorded in April 2011 and released 13 years later, carries Santimone as pianist and arranger, trombonists Giancarlo Schiaffini and Filippo Vignato, trumpeter Flavio Davanzo, Gallo and Gandhi. Mystic Geography (2024, Losen Records), with singer and viola da gamba player Luciana Elizondo and Peghin, ranges from a 1600s French song to a Jóhann Jóhannsson piece and features violinist Anais Drago on the closing track. Streaming listings also place two further releases in his recent output, Out Of Trane (2025) and Paucartambo (2026), neither yet indexed on Discogs.

In September 2026 he made his ECM debut. Ritornare (ECM 2883), recorded in January 2026 at Bavaria Musikstudios in Munich with the Atlantico quintet - Favata, Di Bonaventura, Peghin, Maltana and Gandhi - was produced by Manfred Eicher and released on September 18, 2026. The album draws on Latin American literature, including García Márquez and Borges, and on the crossings of the Atlantic; it was presented in Alghero on September 1 during that year's Musica sulle Bocche. According to his official biographies, he has played more than 2,000 concerts across Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, and worked with musicians including Enrico Rava, Mulatu Astatke, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Omar Sosa, Trilok Gurtu, Lester Bowie and Miroslav Vitous.

Favata is a jazz musician first, and his catalogue says so: Discogs tags 16 of his 18 leader albums as Jazz, with only the two early records Jana and Voyage En Sardaigne filed purely under folk and world music, and his newest record is on ECM. What sets him apart is where the material comes from. Sardinia's layered history - Phoenician, Latin, Arab, Spanish and Italian - and its living folk traditions supply the melodic and rhythmic raw material, from the polyphonic Tenores Di Bitti and the Cuncordu Di Castelsardo to the launeddas and the other island winds he plays alongside his soprano, tenor and bass clarinet. He then improvises on it in a jazz idiom whose reed lineage, by his own account, runs through Coltrane, Shorter, Liebman, Garbarek and Surman, and which has widened over the years to take in Argentine tango (through Saluzzi and Di Bonaventura's bandoneon), Indian tabla, the Brazilian viola caipira, live electronics and, on The Crossing, a fusion-leaning quartet. The Atlantico quintet's own description puts it as a language in which the freedom of jazz dialogues with chamber music and Mediterranean cultures.

His repertoire also draws on the jazz tradition directly: Inner Roads includes a reading of a piece by Charlie Haden, and The Crossing carries a Haden tune, "For Turiya," and a voice sample credited to Fela Kuti on "Black Lives Matter."