Eugenio Colombo was born in Rome on 10 December 1953. He started as a self-taught instrumentalist and composer, took the extraordinary-course saxophone diploma at the Licinio Refice Conservatory in Frosinone in 1982 with the highest marks, studying under Baldo Maestri, and then worked on composition with Michele Dall'Ongaro at the Scuola Popolare di Musica di Testaccio in Rome. He plays alto and soprano saxophone and flute, and Discogs also credits him on bass clarinet, baritone and sopranino saxophones and bass flute. Discogs tags all of his saxophone and flute records as Jazz, with styles that run from Avant-garde Jazz and Free Jazz to Contemporary Jazz.

His first recordings date from 1973: Sud, by the saxophonist Mario Schiano, and Favola Pop, a Produttori Associati LP led by Giorgio Gaslini with the alto saxophonist Massimo Urbani, the bassist Bruno Tommaso and the drummer Bruno Biriaco in the credits. In 1976 he played the kazumba on "Evaporazione" on Area's Maledetti (Maudits) and alto saxophone on the progressive-rock group Grosso Autunno's EMI album. Italian Wikipedia says he founded the Scuola Popolare di Musica di Testaccio in 1975 with Tommaso, the trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, Maurizio Giammarco, the pianist Martin Joseph, the singer Giovanna Marini and others; his own biography dates his role among the founders to 1976. He taught flute, ethnomusicology and ensemble music at the school from 1976 to 1981 and again from 1984 to 1987.

The school circle produced his first working groups. The saxophone group I Virtuosi Di Cave (1978, Red Records) went on to supply most of the sax section of Tommaso Vittorini's Grande Elenco Musicisti, according to Italian Wikipedia. The SIC Trio, with Schiaffini and the percussionist Michele Iannaccone, made 29.9.78 Pezzo and Altri Pezzi in 1978 and returned for Passemmezzo in 1997. The Strutture Di Supporto Quartetto recorded Cioè... in 1978 with Paolo Damiani on bass, and Duets And Solos (1978) paired him with Martin Joseph. Giovanna Marini became a long-running partner. He is credited on her 1979 cantata La Grande Madre Impazzita, as composer of four of its pieces, and on Le Cadeau De l'Empereur (1984).

His own records began in the mid-1980s. Curriculum Vitae (Ismez Polis, 1986) has him on alto, soprano and baritone saxophones and flute with Tommaso, the drummer Ettore Fioravanti and others. Summertime (Splasc(h), 1987) is a set of solo recordings. On 3 March 1988 he played the Teatro Colosseo in Rome with Joseph, the trumpeter Pino Minafra, the voice actor Anna Maria Loliva and a text by the poet Vittorino Curci, released as Notizie Del Sole Vero. Sorgente Sonora, recorded live at Clusone on 30 April 1988, put his writing for a sextet of Minafra, Schiaffini, Fioravanti, the contrabass saxophonist Antonio Balsamo and the flutist Luca Spagnoletti on the Jazz Europe Network label; it was reissued in 2005 alongside new pieces for the Clusone town band. Giada (Splasc(h), 1990) added strings, with Damiani and Tommaso among the players.

From 1990 he has been a member of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, the large ensemble that grew out of the Italian improvised-music scene, and he counts as one of its founders. His name is on its records from Live In Noci And Rive De Gier (Leo Records, 1992) through Skies Of Europe (ECM, 1995), European Concerts '94-'97 (Nel Jazz, 1997), Italian Instabile Festival (Leo, 1998), Litania Sibilante (Enja, 2000), Previsioni Del Tempo / Forecast (Imprint, 2002), Totally Gone (Rai Trade, 2010) and Plays Ellington (Felmay, 2025). Two of them add a headline guest: The Owner Of The River Bank, recorded live at the Talos Festival in Ruvo di Puglia on 10 September 2000 during the orchestra's tenth-anniversary concerts, credits Cecil Taylor on piano, and Creative Orchestra (Bolzano) 2007 was led by Anthony Braxton. Within the orchestra he sat beside reed players Gianluigi Trovesi, Carlo Actis Dato and Daniele Cavallanti, trumpeters Alberto Mandarini and Minafra, cellist Damiani and, on later records, violinist Emanuele Parrini. Discogs also lists him as composer of "Ippopotami" and "Scongiuro" and as soloist on "Sud" and "Peter R E Ballata".

Composition runs through the whole career. In 1993 the Festival dei Popoli in Florence commissioned Giuditta, a cantata for three voices and three instruments, which he recorded at the Teatro Comunale in Modena on 28 March 1995 (Nel Jazz, 1997, billed to the Eugenio Colombo Sextet). Tales Of Love And Death (Leo Records, 2000) pairs it with a second cantata, "Toxon," built on the story of Ulysses, for three female voices and jazz quartet with Bruno Tommaso, Fioravanti and the pianist Gianni Lenoci. Both pieces returned in 2023 as "Judith" and "Toxon" on 7 Dances, a duo with the double bassist Roberto Bartoli. He has also written for solo instruments, saxophone quartet, string trio, big band and brass band with improvising soloists, and scored films, documentaries and dance productions: Mon Frère, Ma Soeur Vendus Pour Quelques Lires (Jungle Films, Brussels, 1997), Rose e Pistole (1998), Alla Fine della Notte by Salvatore Piscicelli (2003), and a long collaboration with the dance company Movimentoinactor from 1998. His concert programs have included works by Luciano Berio and Giacinto Scelsi, and composers who have written for him include Michele Dall'Ongaro, Giovanna Marini and Walter Zimmermann.

The 2000s and 2010s brought a run of small-group records. Tempiduri (Splasc(h), 2003) and United Front (Splasc(h), 2004, recorded in Rome on 11 and 12 November 2003) featured the guitarist Adolfo La Volpe, the bassist Pierpaolo Martino and the reed player Vittorio Gallo, with Minafra on trumpet on United Front. Ciaobelleragazze (Zone di Musica, 2006) is a trio with the tuba and serpent player Michel Godard and the percussionist Carlo Rizzo; Holysmoke (Splasc(h), 2007) a trio with Lenoci and the drummer Marcello Magliocchi; October Songs Play The Songs Of Leonard Cohen (Rudi, 2010) a Cohen program with the singer Raffaella Misiti; Sud America (2010) a duo with the pianist Luigi Bozzolan; Totem (2014) a trio with Schiaffini and the electronics player Luigi Marino, recorded live at Totemtanz in Rome. He is also a member of Roots Magic, a Rome group formed in 2013 that works between deep blues and creative jazz, on flutes and soprano saxophone; the band has recorded four albums for Clean Feed, Discogs credits him on Take Root Among The Stars (2020) and Long Old Road (2023).

In May 2024, reviewing 7 Dances for All About Jazz Italia, Neri Pollastri called him one of the boldest and most surprising musicians Italy has produced since the war, and noted that he had become reluctant to release new work, so that each project is now rare. Elements (Samaveda Music, 2025) is a solo record for flute, saxophone and sampler, with field recording and mixing by Lucio Leoni. Duo concerts with Bartoli have included the Casa del Jazz in Rome on 18 February 2024.

He taught saxophone at conservatories in Matera, Campobasso, Frosinone and, from 2014 to 2016, Rome's Santa Cecilia. The Frosinone post ran from 1989 to 2014, with jazz history added in 2004, and his own site lists a return there from 2016 to 2021; he retired on 1 November 2021. By his own account he has played festivals and concert series across Europe since 1975, with tours in South America, Japan, Canada, the United States, Kenya, Cameroon and Saudi Arabia. Collaborators named on his own site include Misha Mengelberg, Evan Parker, Demetrio Stratos, Alvin Curran and Maurizio Giammarco. His site also lists Steve Lacy among them, and a Discogs entry credits him with the liner notes for Lacy and Martin Joseph's Coastline (2023), but no Discogs record shows the two playing together.

A different Eugenio Colombo, an Italian DJ and producer, has house and tech-house releases that Discogs and Spotify partly file under the same name; none of that material belongs to this profile.

Colombo works where free improvisation, written composition and older musical languages meet. The recurring materials are Mediterranean and Arab modes (the titles "Caffè Arabo," "Cadice," "Lontano da Latakja" and "Sabra"), Renaissance and baroque vocal writing, opera, contemporary concert music and free jazz. Pollastri's review of 7 Dances describes the same blend: a soprano saxophone that moves lightly through the dances and then darkens toward mystery or drama, with Bartoli's bass supplying a deep, singing counterweight, passages that recall baroque opera, and detours into Arab modes and Latin American rhythms, all fused into what he calls a totally original style.

The two lines of work feed each other. The cantatas Giuditta and Toxon have been performed as sextet and septet works, recorded with voices and quartet, and reduced to a saxophone and bass duo, and the same themes return in different scorings over almost three decades. On the improvising side, his partners are the free-jazz players of the Italian Instabile Orchestra and the Testaccio circle, including Schiaffini, Minafra, Tommaso and Fioravanti. Flute is a second front-line voice: he leads the 2005 solo record Racconto Flautato and plays bass flute on Roots Magic's Take Root Among The Stars and on Cry Baby's 2024 Under Cover Of Night.