Francesco Cusa is a drummer, composer, conductor and writer born in Catania in 1966. He started on piano at fourteen and came to the drums through seminars with Ettore Fioravanti, Bruno Biriaco, Roberto Gatto and Massimo Manzi. In 1989 he moved to Bologna, where he graduated from the DAMS program in 1994 with a thesis on the extramusical elements of jazz performance, and where he co-founded the Bassesfere collective with other jazz researchers. His earliest release on Discogs is Amaremandorle (1994, YVP Music), a T.A.O. record with trumpeter Paolo Fresu as a guest on five tracks and singer Cristina Zavalloni on one.

The Bologna years produced a cluster of small-label records. Cusa played in the Specchio Ensemble (Suite No. 1 Per Quintetto Doppio, 1995), with composer-guitarist Domenico Caliri and pianist Fabrizio Puglisi, and in Rosticceria Jorge (L'Inferno Dei Polli, 1996, Splasc(h) Records). The 1996 Catalogo Bassesfere sampler collects Specchio Ensemble, the Cristina Zavalloni Open Quartet and T.A.O. alongside duos of the same circle. In 1997 he made his first record under his own name, Impasse... Su Jacques Prévert (Splasc(h)), settings of Prévert's texts with Zavalloni, two saxophonists and two narrators, and played percussion on La Geometria Dell'abisso, an Alfredo Impullitti project that features Kenny Wheeler on trumpet. He stayed in Zavalloni's Open Quartet through Come Valersi Non Servilmente Di Bertolt Brecht (1998) and When You Go Yes Is Yes! (2004), the latter with bassist Antonio Borghini, trombonist Gianluca Petrella and Puglisi.

In 1999 he recorded with Sicilian players in Conjura and the trio Trionacria, both with trumpeter Roy Paci and, in Trionacria, saxophonist Gianni Gebbia. He founded the label Improvvisatore Involontario with guitarists Paolo Sorge and Carlo Natoli; the label's II series opens with his own Psicopatologia Del Serial Killer (2003, II 0001) and had reached II 064 by Another Way For Meditation (2024). The label became the home for most of his groups: the electric octet Skrunch (L'arte Della Guerra, 2007; Jacques Lacan, A True Musical Story, 2009; Body - Soul - Spirit, 2014), the Naked Musicians, and Cusa & The Assassins (The Beauty And The Grace, 2012; Love, 2015; Live In Collescipoli, 2016). The Naked Musicians are his conducting method rather than a fixed band: A Sicilian Way Of Cooking Mind (2005) is subtitled "Music for 24 Musicians" and credits him as leader and conductor, and Another Way For Meditation (2024) uses eight players.

Outside his own label, the records that reached a wider audience were on Clean Feed and Leo Records. He is the drummer in Jaruzelski's Dream (Jazz Gawronski, 2010, Clean Feed), leads the Francesco Cusa Trio on From Sun Ra To Donald Trump (2017, Clean Feed, with saxophonist Carlo Atti), and recorded Black Poker (2018, Clean Feed) with The Assassins, arranger Duccio Bertini and a string quartet. Human Pieces (2022, Leo Records) is a quartet record with trumpeter Brian Groder, bassist Riccardo Grosso and pianist Tonino Miano, recorded in Catania on 25 October 2021. He has also made duo records with pianist Gianni Lenoci (Wet Cats, 2017, Amirani) and flutist Giorgia Santoro (The Black Shoes, 2022, Dodicilune), and The Uncle (Giano Bifronte) (2020), a two-disc set that pairs The Assassins with the trio and includes bassist Ferdinando Romano.

Beyond the records, his own biography lists festival appearances in 21 countries, from France, Germany and the Netherlands to the USA, Japan, China, Ethiopia and Turkey, and names Paolo Fresu, Kenny Wheeler, Steve Lacy, Tim Berne, Andy Sheppard, Billy Bang and Michel Godard among the musicians he has played with. Fresu, Wheeler and Godard are backed by Discogs credits (Godard plays tuba on Paolo Sorge's Trinkle Trio, 2003, and guests on the Open Quartet's 1998 album); the others are biographical claims with no Discogs credit behind them. He also plays in Solomovie, a live soundtrack project for Buster Keaton films, and has written for dance, theatre, poetry and visual-arts performances. He is a writer as well, with two novels (Vic, 2021, and 2056, 2025), short-story collections, essays and poetry, and film criticism for Italian magazines.

He teaches jazz drums, and per his official biography holds a permanent post at the Conservatorio "Vincenzo Bellini" in Catania since 2023, after earlier conservatory posts in Benevento, Monopoli, Frosinone, Lecce, Reggio Calabria, Messina and Parma. The same biography cites recognition from the magazines Musica Jazz and Jazzit.

Cusa's drumming and composing sit in Italian free jazz and improvisation. Discogs tags his own records mostly as Free Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz, Free Improvisation and Contemporary Jazz, and his sleeves lean on irony: a Prévert setting, a psychopathology of the serial killer, a Lacan record with a combat-manual drawing on the cover, From Sun Ra To Donald Trump, and a 2026 album of cartoon theme songs from his childhood. His degree thesis, on the extramusical elements of jazz performance, points the same way.

Two habits define his approach beyond the trio format. The first is conducting: the Naked Musicians and the Vocal Naked Musicians (Flowers in the Garbage, 2012, seven singers including Zavalloni) are directed by Cusa rather than led from the kit. The second is cross-disciplinary work, from film soundtracks (Solomovie, and a new score for Murnau's Aurora recorded with Zavalloni) to literature. His recorded work with Sicilian and Bolognese players such as Gianni Gebbia, Sorge, Natoli and Roy Paci, and with reed players Piero Bittolo Bon (Skrunch, The Assassins) and Beppe Scardino (Skrunch), shows a scene built around a shared label rather than a single bandleader.