Francesca Tandoi is a Rome-born pianist, singer and composer who built her career in the Netherlands and now records and tours internationally with a swinging piano trio. She started classical piano as a child, and soon turned to jazz through the records of Oscar Peterson, Phineas Newborn, Gene Harris and Bobby Timmons, the swinging virtuoso pianists her Discogs profile names as her first loves. She began working as a teenager on the Rome jazz scene and played some of Italy's major jazz festivals before leaving the country.

In 2009 she moved to the Netherlands. She graduated from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in jazz piano and singing in 2013, with a special mention, then took a master's degree at Codarts in Rotterdam in 2015 with a thesis titled "The art of rearranging jazz standards for jazz piano trio." That subject describes her working method well: her records are largely built from standards and lesser-known jazz tunes, rethought for a trio.

Her trio with the drummer Frits Landesbergen and the bassist Frans van Geest recorded three albums for the Osaka label Atelier Sawano: For Elvira (recorded in Amsterdam in February 2014, released July 2014), Something Blue (December 2014) and Wind Dance (2016). According to her official biography, Wind Dance was named to the yearly top ten of the Japanese magazine Jazz Life. The trio later added Hope (Atelier Sawano, October 2024), recorded in March 2022 with the bassist Stefano Senni in van Geest's chair, and a live album with the Italian tenor saxophonist Max Ionata, Magic 3, recorded at the Walhalla Theater in Rotterdam on May 29, 2018 and released in January 2019.

She has also recorded with the American tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton; her biographies cite several albums with him, and two are itemized on Discogs. She is the pianist on Triple Treat (2017), a trio record with Hamilton and the Dutch singer Léah Kline, recorded in 's-Gravendeel on September 17, 2015, and on Hamilton's own Blue 'N' Boogie (O.A.P. Records, 2018), on which she also sings three tracks. Her official biography counts more than twenty recordings as a sideman, and the Discogs pages for the two Hamilton albums and for Tamuz Nissim's The Music Stays In A Dream (2013) confirm her credits on those.

Her own records since then have moved toward original writing and Italy. In 2018 she recorded Triplets in Rome with the drummer Amedeo Ariano and the bassist Luca Bulgarelli, released on Albore Jazz. When In Rome (Birdbox Records, 2022), a limited edition of 300 numbered copies, and the 2024 vinyl LP Bop Web (Nuccia) are trio records with the drummer Sander Smeets and the bassist Matheus Nicolaiewsky. In 2026 Fresh Sound Records released Songbook Vol. 1, her first album made up entirely of her own compositions, recorded in November 2025 at the Cicaleto studio in Arezzo. It pairs her trio (Senni on bass, Pasquale Fiore on drums) with a string quartet arranged by Cristiano Arcelli and features guest vocals from the American singer Becca Stevens on "Hope" and the American singer Stacey Kent on "Memories of Love." Francesco Ponticelli, the bassist who founded and runs the Cicaleto studio, is credited on Discogs with recording and mixing it.

Her official biography lists Dizzy's Club at Lincoln Center, the Caramoor Jazz Festival in New York, the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, Tokyo's Hakuju Hall and the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza among her venues, and festival dates in the United States, Japan, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Russia, Turkey, Israel and across Europe, including North Sea Jazz, Umbria Jazz and Cork. She has taught masterclasses on arranging at Washington University in St. Louis, at the Moscow Clinics of Jazz and at the University of Pretoria. Since 2024 she has appeared in "Piano Conclave" with Dado Moroni, Rita Marcotulli, Danny Grissett and Benito Gonzalez, a four-pianist project named in her biographies (no release credit for it is indexed on Discogs).

Tandoi plays in the swinging, blues-rooted piano-trio tradition of Oscar Peterson, the pianist her biographies name as her inspiration, with the funk-tinged hard bop of Bobby Timmons and Gene Harris close behind. Her Discogs profile lists those players, along with Phineas Newborn, as her early models; the label's own notes on Hope describe "funky sensibilities" from 1950s and 1960s jazz alongside an Italian melancholy in her own melodies. Discogs styles her records as Swing, Cool Jazz and Contemporary Jazz depending on the release.

Her arranging is a defining trait. Wind Dance pairs standards such as "I Could Write A Book" and "Thou Swell" with the classical piece "Clair de Lune," and Hope moves from "Old Devil Moon" and "Moanin'" to the title track and "Forse." Vocals are a second voice rather than a feature: on the trio records she sings on selected tracks, and on Songbook Vol. 1 she writes and sings her own songs with strings. Pianist Monty Alexander, quoted in her Music Works International biography, praised her taste, her swing and her arrangements.