Ferruccio Spinetti is a double bassist and composer, born in Caserta on September 4, 1970. He took part in the Siena Jazz summer seminars from 1989 to 1991, played in the Fiesole youth orchestra in 1992 and 1993 and then in a youth jazz orchestra directed by Bruno Tommaso and Giancarlo Gazzani, and graduated in double bass in 1994 with top marks and honors. From 1990 he was the rhythm-section bassist of the Piccola Orchestra Avion Travel, the Caserta band fronted by the singer Peppe Servillo. Per his official biography and Italian Wikipedia, he recorded eight studio albums with them, appeared twice at the Sanremo Festival (1998 and, as winners, 2000) and stayed for many years. On Discogs his Avion Travel credits include Opplà (Sugar, 1993), La Guerra Vista Dalla Luna (1996), a short musical opera with the actor Fabrizio Bentivoglio on which he holds a music credit for one track, and the 2007 Paolo Conte tribute Danson Metropoli. Discogs files that catalog mostly under Pop, with jazz as a second tag on several titles, and the same period brought session work for the singer-songwriter Samuele Bersani, the Nada Trio (with the singer Nada and Avion Travel's guitarist Fausto Mesolella) and other Italian pop records.

The move toward jazz billing came through Stefano Bollani. From 2004 to 2008 Spinetti was the double bassist of Stefano Bollani's quintet the Visionari, alongside drummer Cristiano Calcagnile, saxophonist Mirko Guerrini and clarinetist Nico Gori. The double album I Visionari (Label Bleu, 2006) has him on double bass and in the choir, with Paolo Fresu as a guest trumpeter on one track, and Omaggio alle Occasioni Perdute (Casa del Jazz, 2008) carries the same lineup. His own name as a leader came later and from a different direction.

In 2003 he met the singer Petra Magoni just as she was about to tour Tuscan clubs with a guitarist, and she asked him to sit in; the two formed the voice-and-double-bass duo Musica Nuda. Their debut, Musica Nuda (Storie di Note, 2004), was recorded with nothing but her voice and his bass, on songs that included "Eleanor Rigby," "Roxanne," "Nature Boy" and "Imagine." The double album Musica Nuda 2 (Radio Fandango, 2006) added guests on individual tracks, among them Stefano Bollani on piano for three tracks, the trumpeter Erik Truffaz, Fausto Mesolella, Nico Gori and Mirko Guerrini, and it won the 2006 Premio Tenco in the Interpreti category; the duo was also named for best tour at Italy's MEI festival that year. They recorded the Live In Paris DVD at the theatre in Bagneux in March 2006 and a radio concert for FIP at Radio France's Studio 105 on February 1, 2007, and Italian Wikipedia counts several nominations for France's Victoires du Jazz. Three records on Blue Note and EMI followed, 55/21 (2008), Complici (2011) and Banda Larga (2013), the last with orchestral arrangements by Daniele Di Gregorio, and then Little Wonder (2015), Leggera (2017), Verso Sud (2018) and Musica Nuda 20 (2023) for Warner, Edel and 6T3. Girotondo De André (Fonè, 2022) was recorded on September 10, 2021 at the Museo Piaggio in Pontedera in a single analogue session and pressed on vinyl. Italian Wikipedia and Pomigliano Jazz put the duo's total at more than 1,600 concerts across two decades.

Discogs tags 26 of the 27 releases on which he or Musica Nuda is credited in the Main role as Jazz, though most Musica Nuda entries pair that with Pop and the style Vocal, and the duo's repertoire of Beatles, Sting, Madonna, Piaf, Brel and Baroque arias is closer to jazz-inflected song than to the standards tradition. His own leader and co-leader records are clearly jazz. InventaRio (My Favorite Records, 2010) pairs him with the pianist Giovanni Ceccarelli, the Brazilian guitarist and singer Dadi Carvalho and drummer Francesco Petreni on Italian songs and Brazilian repertoire, with guests including Ivan Lins, Marisa Monte, Pacifico and Magoni; its 2012 follow-up InventaRio Incontra Ivan Lins is credited to Lins on Discogs, and his official biography reports a Latin Grammy nomination for it. More Morricone (Bonsaï Music, 2020) is a bass and piano program of fifteen Ennio Morricone film themes with the vocalist Chrystel Wautier, and Le Grand Michel [A Journey With Michel Legrand] (2025) does the same for the repertoire of Michel Legrand, with press-listed guests including André Ceccarelli, Enrico Pieranunzi, Camille Bertault and Chiara Civello.

Arie (Jando Music / Via Veneto Jazz, 2022) is the record that most plainly frames him as a jazz bandleader. With Ceccarelli, Jeff Ballard on drums and the singer Elena Romano, and with Rita Marcotulli as a featured piano soloist on two tracks, it is a fifteen-track songbook of Italian jazz compositions, with lyrics added by Romano. The label and his own site credit pieces by Enrico Rava, Bruno Tommaso, Enrico Pieranunzi, Paolo Fresu, Luca Flores, Enrico Zanisi and Cesare Picco, along with Spinetti's own "Fausto," a duo with Ballard dedicated to Mesolella. A live duo record with Mesolella, recorded in Monteprandone on October 24, 2007 and issued by Fonè in 2024, followed it.

He is also a working session bassist on other leaders' jazz records: as guest double bassist on Pagine Vere (Da Vinci Jazz, 2021) by Michela Lombardi, Giovanni Ceccarelli and Luca Falomi, on Ceccarelli's trio album Météores (2011), on Francesco Petreni's Prima (2016), which also credits Larry Grenadier and Enrico Pieranunzi, and on the Brazilian-flavored As Madalenas (Jando Music, 2023) with clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi. Earlier, on Nada's L'Amore È Fortissimo E Il Corpo No (2001), he played double bass alongside Rita Marcotulli on piano and Javier Girotto on saxophone.

He teaches as well. He taught double bass and ensemble music at Siena Jazz from 1997 to 2004 and again from the early 2010s, at the Rossini Conservatory in Pesaro in 2013 and 2014, and jazz double bass at the Morlacchi Conservatory in Perugia from 2016 to 2022, and since 2022 he has taught at the Puccini Conservatory in La Spezia. Since 2018 he has been artistic director of the Premio Bianca D'Aponte, a prize for female singer-songwriters. In 2021 he wrote the score for the film Anime Borboniche, and in 2022 he took part with Bentivoglio in "Lettura clandestina," a reading of Ennio Flaiano's journalism. Italian biographies also say he collaborated with the late pianist Mal Waldron and with Arto Lindsay, who appears with Avion Travel on a 1998 single; no shared release credit with Waldron is listed on Discogs.

Spinetti's career runs across two worlds that Italian music keeps close together: the song-theater and pop-cantautore scene he came up through with Avion Travel, and the jazz education and conservatory circuit he now teaches in. Musica Nuda is where the two meet. The duo covers pop, rock, opera and folk songs, and Citizen Jazz's Sophie Chambon, reviewing Musica Nuda 2 in July 2006, praised his "freshness" and long solos in the accompaniment. His two film-music records with Ceccarelli, More Morricone and Le Grand Michel, reduce the source repertoire to bass and piano, and Action Jazz describes the Legrand album's register as stripped-down and intimate rather than orchestral. On Arie he is a composer as well as a bassist, with "Fausto," "December" and "Passato Futuro" credited to him or shared with Romano and Ceccarelli.

Musica Nuda and his Avion Travel work sit between vocal jazz and pop, hence the Vocal Jazz and Jazz Pop tags, with Latin Jazz for the InventaRio records; his Discogs credits also include many pure pop sessions that are not jazz.