Filippo Vignato is a trombonist, improviser and composer from Thiene, in the province of Vicenza, born in 1987 and now based in Venice. He grew up in a musical family and trained at the Frescobaldi Conservatory in Ferrara (jazz trombone, 2007 to 2010) and the Venezze Conservatory in Rovigo (2010 to 2013), spent a nine-month Erasmus exchange at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in 2011 and 2012, and then studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris, where he took a master's in jazz and improvised music (2013 to 2015) and a postgraduate diploma in generative improvisation (2014 to 2016), graduating with top marks.

His first records came from two different scenes. He played trombone and wrote horn arrangements for the Venetian ska band Ska-J, and in September 2011 he recorded Omit Five (Caligola) in Trieste with the quintet of the same name, which also included alto saxophonist Mattia Dalla Pozza, bassist Rosa Brunello, drummer Simone Sferruzza and guitarist Joseph Circelli. Omit Five won the 2011 Barga Jazz contest, and Vignato took the Luca Flores prize as best soloist. In 2013 he won second prize in the trombone category of an international soloists' competition in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. Other quintets followed: Malkuth (Rudi Records, 2015), a free-jazz record with trumpeter Mirko Cisilino, tenor saxophonist Filippo Orefice, bassist Mattia Magatelli and drummer Alessandro Mansutti, and MOF, whose Fried Generation (Auand, 2013) preceded its win in the 2015 We Insist circuit for young Italian groups.

Since 2014 he has led an electric trio with the Hungarian drummer Attila Gyárfás and pianist Yannick Lestra, who plays Fender Rhodes and synth bass. Its debut, Plastic Breath (Auand, September 2016), was recorded in Paris and Budapest in 2015, mostly on a 1-inch analog tape recorder, and it was his first record as a leader. It earned him the Best New Talent award in the Top Jazz 2016 critics' referendum run by Musica Jazz, Italy's longest-running jazz monthly. In 2017 the trio won the European Young Artists Jazz Award at the Jazzwoche in Burghausen, Germany, and Vignato won the international prize named for Giorgio Gaslini. The Top Jazz compilation CD that Musica Jazz issued in 2017 includes the trio's "Other Each," and the trio's double LP Heidelberg (Live at Enjoy Jazz) (Auand, 2020) documents an October 2018 concert.

The acoustic side of his work is a quartet with pianist Giovanni Guidi, bassist Mattia Magatelli and Gyárfás, which made Harvesting Minds (CAM Jazz, September 2017), with liner notes by Brian Morton. Musica Jazz's review called it a real quartet record rather than a leader's showcase and compared his trombone playing to Albert Mangelsdorff's. In May 2017 the Vicenza Jazz New Conversation festival gave him a carte blanche of three concerts, in which he presented the trio, the quartet and his solo trombone program All About Dreaming, which he later took on an eleven-date European tour in September and October 2024.

In 2017 he also founded Pipe Dream with drummer Zeno De Rossi, vibraphonist Pasquale Mirra, pianist Giorgio Pacorig and the American cellist Hank Roberts. Their self-titled CAM Jazz album (September 2018) placed second among albums in the Top Jazz 2018 referendum, according to Vignato's biography, and Blue Roads followed in 2022. Vignato and Roberts also work as a duo: Ghost Dance (CAM Jazz, 2019) is a concert recording made at a winery in Friuli in June 2018, and Adagio (HORA Records, 2024) is a studio album of six Vignato originals, two Roberts pieces, two Ornette Coleman tunes and two pieces they wrote together. A second duo, with the French pianist Enzo Carniel as Silent Room, recorded Aria (Menace, 2021).

He has a long list of sideman credits on Italy's independent jazz labels. In Ghost Horse he plays alongside saxophonist Dan Kinzelman, tubist Glauco Benedetti, baritone guitarist Gabrio Baldacci, bassist Joe Rehmer and drummer Stefano Tamborrino on Trojan (Auand, 2020), Live at Area Sismica (HORA, 2021) and Il Bene Comune (HORA, 2022). He appears with Piero Bittolo Bon's Bread & Fox on Big Hell On Air (2016) and This Is Sour Music (2019), with Andrea Grillini on drums for both, and on Zeno De Rossi's Zenophilia (2017). He also plays on records by Rosa Brunello y Los Fermentos, trumpeter Giovanni Falzone's quintet, Ettore Fioravanti's Opus Magnum and Enzo Favata, and he is one of three trombonists in the Unscientific Italians, Alfonso Santimone's arrangements of Bill Frisell's music for HORA Records. With the Auanders, the house band of the Auand label, he recorded Text(us) (2020) alongside Beppe Scardino, Francesco Bearzatti, Enrico Zanisi and Francesco Ponticelli.

He has also worked with Paolo Fresu. Vignato was a special guest on the 2020 ReWanderlust tour of Fresu's quintet and, according to his biography, has been part of Fresu's Heroes project since 2021, with tours of Italy in summer 2021 and Spain in November 2022. On Fresu's two-disc Kind of Miles (Tǔk Music, 2024) he plays trombone, effects and synthesizer, and is credited as a writer on five tracks; guitarist Bebo Ferra and pianist Dino Rubino are in the band.

Sliders (HORA Records, November 2024) puts Vignato with fellow trombonists Federico Pierantoni and Lorenzo Manfredini on 17 tracks with no rhythm section, mixing originals with pieces by Carla Bley, Egberto Gismonti, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. HORA is a label created and run by musicians, founded in 2021 and administered by the Metrotime cooperative, which has produced his trio since 2018.

Outside jazz clubs he writes for contemporary dance, collaborating with the Verona choreographer Camilla Monga on Golden Variations for the Bolzano Danza festival and on SWAEN. He has taught jazz trombone and ensemble music at Siena Jazz University since the 2020/2021 academic year and at the Verona Conservatory since 2022/2023, where his subjects include analysis of jazz forms and a research workshop on free improvisation.

Vignato works at the meeting point of jazz, free improvisation and contemporary composition. Discogs tags his own records mostly as Contemporary Jazz, with Avant-garde Jazz on Heidelberg and Adagio, Free Improvisation on Adagio and Free Jazz on Malkuth. His playing has been compared to Albert Mangelsdorff's in Musica Jazz's Harvesting Minds review; a profile in the Verona newspaper L'Arena lists Lawrence Brown, J. J. Johnson, George Lewis and Ray Anderson among his inspirations and quotes him on looking for what lies behind or around the explicit surface of the music.

Electronics and effects are part of his palette: he is credited with filters and effects on Plastic Breath, live electronics on Ghost Dance and electronics on Rosa Brunello's Volverse, and he has researched extended techniques for the trombone. All About Dreaming, his solo program, works without electronics, as a dialogue with the echoes and resonances of each room he plays in. His music ranges from the trio's Rhodes-and-drums writing to the open duets with Roberts and Carniel, and his sideman work covers the Frisell arrangements of the Unscientific Italians, the Bowie repertoire of Fresu's Heroes and Ghost Horse's electronic-tinged free improvisation.