Evita Polidoro is an Italian drummer, singer and composer who sits in the drum chair of trumpeter Enrico Rava's Fearless Five and leads her own trio-and-songwriting project, Nerovivo, on the side. She was born in 1995 in Sesto San Giovanni, near Milan, and grew up from age six in a village of about thirty people on Lake Maggiore in Piedmont. Her father is a drummer and her mother a singer, though neither worked as a professional. She began with classical piano lessons and earned a diploma in music theory and solfège at the Turin Conservatory in 2009, then moved to drums, which she played in grunge and indie-rock bands as a teenager. Between 2011 and 2014 she won national and international percussion competitions.

Her route into jazz ran through the Siena Jazz Foundation, where she completed the academic three-year course (2015 to 2018, with a degree recorded in 2020 by some sources) and studied with Fabrizio Sferra and Alessandro Paternesi. Before that, she played drums in Rumor, an indie-pop-rock band from the province of Novara that reached the Sanremo Giovani contest on Rai 1. At Siena she met the two guitarists who became her core collaborators, Nicolò Francesco Faraglia and Davide Strangio; the trio, called Nerovivo, dates to 2018 and reached the final of the Conad Jazz Contest in 2019. Press profiles also say she shared Siena stages with visiting players such as Miguel Zenón and Shai Maestro; those appearances are documented in interviews, not in release credits.

It was at the Siena summer seminars that Rava heard her, according to press profiles, and she became the drummer and occasional singer of the Fearless Five, the quintet he assembled in 2023 with trombonist Matteo Paggi, bassist Francesco Ponticelli and guitarist Francesco Diodati. Their album Fearless Five (Parco Della Musica Records, 2024) was recorded at Rome's Casa del Jazz on February 23 and 24, 2024, and won both Album of the Year and Band of the Year in the 2024 Musica Jazz Top Jazz critics' poll; Paggi took the Nuovo Talento prize the same year. Polidoro was still in the lineup at the group's August 1, 2026 concert at the Casa del Jazz. She had herself placed second in the Nuovo Talento category of the 2023 Top Jazz poll.

Other high-profile chairs followed. In 2023 she joined vocalist Maria Pia De Vito's new quintet for This Woman's Work (Parco Della Musica Records), a record of originals and readings of Tony Williams, Ornette Coleman, Elvis Costello and Kate Bush; she is credited on drums at the release level. Press and concert listings also place her as the drummer of Dee Dee Bridgewater's "We Exist!" quartet, alongside pianist Carmen Staaf and bassist Rosa Brunello, on an Italian tour in 2021 and a European tour in 2022 that included London's Ronnie Scott's. That connection rests on those listings and interviews; there is no Discogs release credit for it. She has also toured as a drummer with the pop singer Francesca Michielin, opened for Green Day at Firenze Rocks in 2022 as part of Matteo Crea's project, and plays and sings in COME ON, DIE, a Rome-based rock band with Ruggero Fornari and Michele Mariola.

On record she is credited as a sideman on a run of Italian contemporary-jazz releases: Danilo Blaiotta's Planetariat (Filibusta Records) alongside saxophonist and bass clarinetist Achille Succi; Michele Bonifati's Three Knots (Nusica.org, 2023); Ferdinando Romano's Invisible Painters (Jam/UnJam, 2023), for which she also played the 12Points showcase; and Giacomo Nardelli's Messaggi Importanti (Broda, 2023), a jazz-funk record that Discogs also tags hip hop. Her one credit outside the jazz world on Discogs is Lorenzo Pucci's indie-pop Sono Sempre In Ritardo (2021).

Her own records are Nerovivo (Tǔk Music, February 16, 2024) and Mi Giurano Eternità (Columbia/Sony Music Italy, June 12, 2026). Nerovivo is a drums-and-two-guitars record of eight tracks recorded in November at Cicaleto Recording Studio in Arezzo, released on Paolo Fresu's label with Fresu credited as executive producer. Critics placed it between contemporary jazz, post-rock and ambient electronics: Off Topic called it "notturno, elegante, inquieto" (nocturnal, elegant, restless) and compared its long silences to Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, and OndaRock's Roberto Mandolini named the record's post-rock, indie-pop and singer-songwriter reach. The project was selected for I-Jazz's Nuova Generazione Jazz 2024 and took her to Rotterdam, the Stockholm Jazz Festival (October 18, 2024) and the Eurosonic Noorderslag showcase in Groningen in January 2025, where Italy was the focus country. In 2024 European Jazz Publications also included her among the eight artists of its Giant Steps International Women's Day feature.

Mi Giurano Eternità is a shorter, more song-led and electronics-heavy record of seven tracks (about 26 minutes) in Italian and English, made with Faraglia, Strangio, producer Ruggero Fornari and a guest turn from Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo on "i see big changes." Polidoro sings and plays piano, synthesizer and drum programming on it. She has based herself in Rome since around 2020 or 2021.

Polidoro describes herself as "a sincere drummer," one who serves the music and sets ego aside, and her drumming is often described as a timbral and harmonic voice rather than a purely rhythmic one. Her leader work sits at the border of contemporary jazz and post-rock, and she says plainly that her listening is not jazz-first: she names post-punk and new wave (Fontaines D.C., King Krule, Black Midi, IDLES), ambient and experimental electronics (Tim Hecker, William Basinski, Aphex Twin), Debussy and Jeff Buckley, and in one interview said she listens to very little jazz. Nerovivo's own press describes the sound as "contaminated" by rock, pop and electronics. She keeps a large-ensemble dream alive alongside all that, citing the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras as the kind of band she would like to play in.

That mix explains the split in her public work: jazz-critical press, Musica Jazz's polls, the Siena Jazz and Nuova Generazione Jazz pipelines and the Rava, De Vito and Bridgewater chairs on one side, and a rock band, pop-tour work and a major-label songwriter record on the other. Her Discogs catalog, however, is overwhelmingly jazz-tagged, and the jazz world is where the awards and institutional recognition sit.