Franco D'Andrea has been a working pianist since 1963, when he started out in trumpeter Nunzio Rotondo's band for Italian broadcaster RAI. By 1964 he'd moved into Gato Barbieri's group, his first real proving ground alongside a musician who would go on to international fame in his own right.

In Rome, over two nights in April 1968, D'Andrea co-founded the Modern Art Trio with drummer Franco Tonani and bassist Bruno Tommaso, a group shaped partly by D'Andrea's own study of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern's serialist technique. Their sole album, recorded that April and released on Vedette in 1970, became a best-seller in Italy and a recognized landmark of the European free-jazz piano-trio format. It was remastered and reissued in full in 2023, more than fifty years after its original release.

From 1972 to 1977, D'Andrea took an unexpected turn: he played keyboards in Perigeo, bassist Giovanni Tommaso's jazz-rock quintet (with Tony Sidney on guitar, Claudio Fasoli on saxophones, and Bruno Biriaco on drums). Perigeo cut five studio albums starting with Azimut in 1972, toured as far as the Montreux Casino, and is credited by Italian music historians as one of the country's original routes into progressive rock, running alongside the more famous British prog sound rather than imitating it.

By 1978 D'Andrea was back to leading his own groups, moving through a series of trios, quartets, and larger ensembles over the following decades, and increasingly performing unaccompanied solo piano. In 1991 he co-led Earthcake, a quartet record with Enrico Rava on trumpet and flugelhorn, bassist Miroslav Vitous, and drummer Daniel Humair, recorded in Paris. In 2001 he recorded eight solo piano albums in a single stretch of sessions, released that year and the next as the Solo series, moving through standards, freely abstract playing, and dedicated programs built around Duke Ellington, Gato Barbieri, and Neapolitan song. He recorded The Siena Concert live in 2006 at the Siena Jazz Foundation's Enoteca Jazz Club Festival, released on Blue Note in 2008.

Teaching has run alongside the performing career throughout. D'Andrea held a piano post at the Conservatorio "F.A. Bonporti" in Trento from 1994 to 2006, and continues to teach at the Mitteleuropean Jazz Academy in his hometown of Merano and at Siena Jazz.

Musica Jazz magazine's Top Jazz poll has named him Italy's best musician twelve times between 1982 and 2018. The Académie du Jazz de France gave him its "Musicien Européen de l'année" award in 2010, and the Italian Jazz Awards gave him an honorary Luca Flores award in 2011. Across his career he has recorded or performed with Steve Lacy, Dave Liebman, John Surman, Kenny Wheeler, Phil Woods, Ernst Reijseger, Slide Hampton, Frank Rosolino, Conte Candoli, Max Roach, Lee Konitz, Johnny Griffin, Tony Scott, Han Bennink, and Dave Douglas, among others.

Drummer Roberto Gatto has appeared on D'Andrea recordings on and off since 1988, most recently on 2024's Something Bluesy and More, a trio album with bassist Gabriele Evangelista. On February 8, 2025, at age 83, D'Andrea played a fully improvised solo piano concert in Milan built around Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, with no setlist prepared in advance.

D'Andrea's playing crosses more genuinely distinct eras of Italian jazz than almost any other figure in the tradition. His formative period drew on Second Viennese School serialism (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), channeled into the Modern Art Trio's free-jazz vocabulary. His Perigeo years put him inside a jazz-rock-fusion band deliberately conceived as an Italian alternative to British progressive rock. From 1978 onward, his own-name recordings run from postbop standards playing through fully abstract solo improvisation to dedicated repertoire projects built around a single composer (Ellington, Gershwin, Monk) or a single American songbook era.

That range is the throughline: D'Andrea treats "jazz pianist" as a job with several distinct registers rather than one fixed style, and has kept moving between them across six decades rather than settling into any single one.