Francesco Buzzurro is a Sicilian guitarist, composer and teacher, born in Taormina in 1969, who plays jazz on a nylon-string classical guitar. He began the instrument at age six and trained as a classical player at the conservatory in Sicily, later studying with masters including Alberto Ponce and David Russell at the International Arts Academy in Rome. His official biography lists three national guitar competitions among his early wins (Città di Alassio, Benedetto Albanese in Caccamo and Savona in Musica) and a separate degree in foreign languages and literatures.

His jazz education came on the bandstand. In his twenties he joined the Sicilia Jazz Big Band, directed by Claudio Lo Cascio, and then the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana, directed by Ignazio Garsia, where he learned swing-era repertoire by Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Count Basie, as he told Musica Jazz. His earliest recordings on Discogs are two tracks on Splasc(h) Records' Sicilian Jazz Collection series: "Autumn Leaves" on Volume 2 (1993) and "Latinus" on Volume 3 (1994). Volume 2 also carries a track by the Sicilia Jazz Big Band. In 2010 he took a degree in jazz music with distinction at the conservatory, and he has taught jazz guitar at the conservatories of Salerno (for eight years, per the Musica Jazz interview), and now at Palermo, where the Conservatorio Scarlatti lists him as instructor of jazz guitar. He is a regular guest at the University of Southern California for both classical and jazz guitar seminars, and he told Musica Jazz that he turned down a faculty post there to stay in Sicily with his children.

His own records begin with the quartet album Latinus (1998) and Naxos (2006), the latter with Mauro Schiavone on piano, Riccardo Lo Bue on bass and Sebastiano Alioto on drums, pairing Latin jazz and tango pieces with a version of "Caravan" and his own "Song for Django." Solo records followed: Freely (2001), the world-repertoire L'esploratore (2009) and One Man Band (2012), a collection of jazz standards including "All of Me," "Blue Monk," "Nuages" and "Someday My Prince Will Come." With the American guitarist Richard Smith he made the duo album Un Mondo, Due Chitarre (recorded in Palermo in summer 2010), issued on streaming platforms as One Word, Two Guitars, and a second duo record, Heart of the Emigrants (2016).

Il quinto elemento (2014) is a set of his own compositions built on the four classical elements, structured as four three-movement mini-sonatas. In 2015 he was billed among the musicians on the saxophonist Francesco Cafiso's three-disc project 3 (Alfredo Lo Faro Produzioni), where a review credits him with guitar on a single track, "Dominaciones," on the La banda disc. Solo con Django (2020), a fingerstyle solo tribute to Django Reinhardt, pairs Reinhardt pieces such as "Nuages" and "Douce Ambiance" with "Tiger Rag," "Sweet Georgia Brown," Debussy's "Clair de Lune" and his own "Song for Django." In July 2024 he released Uno a Uno, twelve guitar duets with the Brazilian guitarist Yamandu Costa recorded in Lisbon, after Costa joined him on a Sicilian tour in 2019.

Beyond his own albums, Discogs credits him as a mandolinist on the German group Quadro Nuevo's The Early Years box set (2017), which collects its 2002 album Canzone della strada, as classical-guitar soloist on "Cabina Dolce" from Richard Smith's Tangos (2014), and as an uncredited guitarist on the Sicilian singer-songwriter Pippo Pollina's live DVD Live At Volkshaus Zürich (2013). He has also written music for theater and television, including the film music for the docufilm Io ricordo, which brought a 2008 Efebo d'Oro and, according to his listed awards, a 2010 prize presented by Italy's president. In 2009 he received the Groove Master Award for his approach to groove and contemporary jazz. His official biography names Toots Thielemans, Diane Schuur, Arturo Sandoval, Peter Erskine and Bireli Lagrene among the players he has worked with; none of those is an itemized release credit on Discogs, so they are stated collaborations rather than documented records. He is based in Agrigento.

Buzzurro is best described as a classical guitarist whose working life is in jazz. He plays fingerstyle on a nylon-string instrument and treats it, like an orchestra, as his promoters put it: bass lines, chords and melody all at once, with improvised variations added on top of existing pieces. In a 2011 interview with Fingerpicking.net he named Paco de Lucia, Joe Pass and John Williams among the players he grew up admiring and said he resists being confined to a single genre. In the Musica Jazz interview he adds Andres Segovia and Baden Powell, and says he learned jazz by listening and transcribing solos.

The repertoire covers jazz standards ("Blue Monk," "Nuages," "Caravan," "Cantaloupe Island"), Latin and Brazilian music (bossa nova, choro, tango), Sicilian and Mediterranean folk themes, classical pieces such as "Clair de Lune" and pop-leaning material. Discogs tags most of his own albums as Jazz (sometimes alongside Classical, Latin or Blues) and two, L'esploratore and One Man Band, as Folk, World, & Country, although the second is a program of jazz standards; its artist profile calls him an "Italian classical guitarist." The jazz side is the more documented: the conservatory jazz-guitar chair, the big-band apprenticeship and the standards-and-Django solo records. Sicilian material threads through it all, and Il quinto elemento is described by the artist himself as a tribute to his region.