Francesco Bearzatti came to jazz late and from the wrong direction, which turns out to be the most useful fact about him.

He was born in Pordenone, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, on 9 October 1966, and grew up on rock. Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple first, then the Ramones and the Sex Pistols when punk reached the north-east of Italy. He spent years playing rock and pop in local clubs, worked as a DJ, and made electronic records. Alongside that he took a clarinet diploma at the Conservatory of Udine and studied composition with Daniele Zanettovich, and only afterwards went to New York to study jazz at Jazzmobile with George Coleman.

The professional record starts in 1994, when he formed the Kaiser Lupowitz Trio with guitarist Enrico Terragnoli and drummer Zeno De Rossi. In 1995 he recorded Live At Vartan Jazz with Valery Ponomarev, the trumpeter who had come out of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. His first album as a leader, Suspended Steps, came out on Caligola in 1998 under the Francesco Bearzatti Quartet billing, with Paolo Birro on piano, Marc Abrams on double bass and Max Chiarella on drums.

Italy noticed him in 2003, when the critics polled for Musica Jazz's Top Jazz referendum voted him Best New Talent. The same magazine gave him first prize as best Italian saxophonist in 2010. By then he had based himself in Paris and built a second career there. He recorded Because Of Bechet (2002) with Aldo Romano, then Chante (2005) and État De Fait (2007) on Dreyfus Jazz with the same drummer. He formed the Bizart Trio with organist Emmanuel Bex, whose 2004 album Hope on Auand puts Bearzatti, Bex, Romano and Enrico Rava on one record. He played in Henri Texier's Nord-Sud Quintet on Canto Negro (2011), and in 2014 he co-founded the Sunday Jazz Loft concert series in Paris. In 2011 the Académie du Jazz named him European Musician of the Year.

The work he is best known for began in 2007, at Stefano Amerio's Artesuono studio in Cavalicco, just outside Udine, where he recorded a composed suite about Tina Modotti. Modotti was born in Udine in 1896, emigrated, worked as an actress and then as a photographer in Mexico, joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, and died in Mexico City in 1942. Parco della Musica Records released Suite For Tina Modotti in 2008. Bearzatti then kept her name for the band. "Tinissima", the superlative of Tina and the title of Pino Cacucci's biography of her, has been the group's name ever since, with Giovanni Falzone on trumpet, Danilo Gallo on bass and Zeno De Rossi on drums.

That first suite set the method for everything the quartet did afterwards. X (Suite For Malcolm) (2010) is about Malcolm X and adds the Cincinnati vocalist and beatboxer Napoleon Maddox. Monk'N'Roll (CAM Jazz, 2013) crosses Thelonious Monk themes with rock repertoire. This Machine Kills Fascists (CAM Jazz, 2015) is about Woody Guthrie and takes its title from the phrase Guthrie wrote on his guitar. Zorro (CAM Jazz, 16 October 2020) arrived on the centenary of the character and was framed around jazz as a music of liberation and of resistance to injustice. The same four musicians played on all five.

Outside the quartet the habit holds. Portrait Of Tony (Parco della Musica Records, 23 July 2021) was written for the centenary of Tony Scott, the American clarinetist born Anthony Joseph Sciacca to Sicilian parents in Morristown, New Jersey. Dear Trane (2017) and Dear John (CAM Jazz, 2019, live with Benjamin Moussay and Roberto Gatto) are both for Coltrane.

The rock never left the catalogue either. His trio with Stomu Takeishi and Dan Weiss is billed as Sax Pistols on Stolen Days (Auand, 2006), where Bearzatti is credited for saxophone and electronics. Post Atomic Zep (doKumenta Music, 28 April 2023), with Danilo Gallo and Stefano Tamborrino, works Led Zeppelin repertoire. He appears on two albums by the Italian indie-punk band Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti, Sindacato Dei Sogni (2019) and Meme K Ultra (2022).

Since then the records have kept arriving: ElectricFranco (Da Vinci Jazz, 2023), which reworks the music of Franco D'Andrea; a second duo with guitarist Federico Casagrande, And Then Winter Came Again (CAM Jazz, 13 September 2024); and a trio with Stefano Risso and Mattia Barbieri, Behind Anatomy (Auand, 2024). He curated the 2023 edition of Open Jazz, a concert series in his home town of Pordenone.

On 16 and 17 June 2024 he took a double quartet into East Studio at Cormons, near Gorizia: Federico Casagrande on guitar, Alessandro Turchet on double bass, U.T. Gandhi and Luca Colussi both on drums, the Arrigoni string quartet, and the VocinVolo choir directed by Lucia Follador. Parco della Musica Records released the result on 30 January 2026 as The Peace Concert. Among its seven tracks is "People Have The Power", written by Patti Smith.

Bearzatti's writing is programmatic in a way most jazz is not. His records are composed suites about a single life, and the subjects share a shape: Tina Modotti, Malcolm X, Woody Guthrie and the fictional Zorro are all figures of resistance, and he treats each as material for a narrative arc rather than as a theme to blow over. On the Guthrie record that reaches as far as the whole quartet singing.

The playing draws on bebop and post-bop language, but the framing is closer to European large-form composition, and the surfaces are frequently loud. His own listening history explains a good deal of that: Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, the Ramones and the Sex Pistols came before jazz did, and rock repertoire keeps returning as source material rather than as novelty, from Monk'N'Roll through Post Atomic Zep to a Patti Smith song on The Peace Concert. Electronics recur too, from the Sax Pistols trio in 2006 to the Martux_M collaborations.

His clarinet playing is a separate strand. He took his diploma on the instrument before he was a saxophonist of record, and Portrait Of Tony is a full album written from one clarinetist to another. Comparisons to Charles Mingus turn up in Italian criticism for the way he moves between the avant-garde and tradition inside a single piece.