Francesco D'Errico is a Neapolitan pianist, composer and philosopher, born in Naples in 1962. He took a degree in philosophy at the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples, where his thesis, "Leibniz e la musica", became a book in 2005, and later a master's degree in philosophy at the University Federico II. Alongside that he trained as a jazz pianist, studying and playing with Franco D'Andrea, Mike Longo, Steve Kuhn, Enrico Renna and Antonio De Rosa according to his label biography, attending the International Seminars of Siena and spending time studying in France and the United States. His own account puts the roots of his music in modern jazz, European music and contemporary improvisation.

His recording career opened in 1989 with Lunaria (Sunset Studio), a quintet album with bassist Ares Tavolazzi, drummer Fabrizio Sferra, guitarist Antonio Onorato and the Neapolitan saxophonist Daniele Sepe. The Francesco D'Errico Quartet followed with Tartana (YVP Music, 1992), again with Tavolazzi and Sferra plus Paolo Innarella on soprano saxophone and flute, and the Quintet with Riflessi E Ideati (Polosud, 1997), which added the vocalist Carmen Femiano. In 1991 he was the pianist of the Enzo Nini Rubber Band on Quartieri Spagnoli, alongside bassist Bruno Tommaso. The German label YVP Music also issued Av. Of The Americas (2000), recorded on October 7, 1998 with New York bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Bob Moses, and Specchio Per Le Nubi (2003), a record whose cover credits the Syrian poet Adonis and his poetry. His conservatory biography counts twenty CDs under his own name between 1989 and 2023 and about forty collaborations for Italian and foreign labels, and lists Markus Stockhausen, Norma Winstone, Evan Parker and Marc Ribot among his collaborators; of those, Discogs confirms the credits with Stockhausen and Parker described below, while the others rest on his own biography.

From the 2000s he worked in two directions at once. The first was the piano trio with bassist Marco De Tilla and drummer Dario Guidobaldi, which recorded A Glance (Itinera, 2010), Waiting For The Queen and And Now The Queen (both Itinera, 2012). The last is a 25-track set organised as four suites of baroque dance forms, with piano, bass and drum meditations between the suites. The second was contemporary improvisation in Naples with Ensemble Dissonanzen, in which Discogs credits him on synthesizer, electronics and piano: Musica Porosa (2004, with trumpeter Markus Stockhausen), the Adam Rudolph project Pietrasanta (2010), Voi Ch'amate Lo Criatore (2018, with trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini and singer Silvia Schiavoni), and Linger Like Joy In Memory (2018), a June 2014 session with saxophonist Evan Parker for which D'Errico is credited on synthesizer and sampler and as producer. In 2007 he recorded The Gray Goose with saxophonist and clarinetist Claudio Lugo, drummer Famoudou Don Moye and Hartmut Geerken, a set of Brecht and Eisler settings.

His main Itinera project of recent years is Gesualdo (Itinera, 2017), a quintet album in which he studied the metrical and intervallic patterns of the sixth book of madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa and rebuilt those atmospheres in a modern idiom. He has said his father was born in Gesualdo's home town. The quintet features saxophonist Giulio Martino, guitarist Antonio Iaseveoli (as Discogs spells the name), bassist Marco De Tilla and drummer Dario Guidobaldi, and D'Errico adds electronics to the piano. In 2017 he also founded the record label Black Sheep Power, which issued Astigmatic Music and Linger Like Joy In Memory.

D'Errico is also a teacher and writer. He now teaches jazz piano and the philosophy of music at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, and has taught jazz piano, jazz harmony and composition at conservatories in Naples, Salerno, Potenza, Cosenza, Perugia, Matera and Foggia, as well as running Erasmus masterclasses in Estonia and Spain. He directed the programs of the Ismez institute from 2002 to 2007, the jazz section of Pianocity Napoli from 2013 to 2018, and has directed Wunderkammermusic Napoli since 2014. His books include Leibniz e la musica (2005), Fuor di metafora, sette osservazioni sull'improvvisazione musicale (2015) and Armonia Funzionale e Modalità (2017), and he has led seminars on the philosophy of music, including one at the Sorbonne in 2010. He has performed in Italy, the United States, France, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Kosovo and Syria, at festivals including Pomigliano Jazz and Prishtina Jazz Festival.

The Campania Region's cultural portal describes D'Errico's music as meditative, with substantial sonorities that are classical in their essentiality and a look toward experimentation. His records move between three registers: mainstream small-group jazz (the 1980s and 1990s quartets and quintets), chamber and baroque-derived writing (the And Now The Queen dance suites and the Gesualdo project) and free improvisation with electronics (Ensemble Dissonanzen, the Evan Parker session, The Gray Goose). He has said that as a jazz pianist he keeps finding connections to earlier music, which led him first to Bach and then to Gesualdo, and he grew up in the 1970s, when artistic exploration was widely valued. The philosophy degree is not a footnote: he treats improvisation as an object of theoretical study and looks for creativity beyond African-American traditions in painting, theatre and poetry, and his projects have included collaborations with the poet Adonis and the visual artists Marco Nereo Rotelli and Shozo Shimamoto.