Gabriele Evangelista is a double bassist born in Poggibonsi, near Siena, in 1988 and raised in Livorno. He has been the bassist in trumpeter Enrico Rava's groups since 2010, appears on three of Rava's ECM albums, Tribe (2011), Wild Dance (2015) and Edizione Speciale (2021), and since 2024 is the bassist in pianist Franco D'Andrea's trio with drummer Roberto Gatto. Discogs credits him on 59 releases, 58 of them tagged Jazz, and he has never released an album under his name alone; his records are co-billed trio dates and sideman work.

He began as a classical player. According to his published biographies, he took his double bass diploma in 2006 with highest honors and a ministerial distinction from the Istituto Musicale "P. Mascagni" in Livorno, studying with Paolo Tommasi and later Alberto Bocini. Between 2002 and 2007 he played in orchestras and chamber groups and as a solo bassist, with a scholarship (the Marco Salvini award, 2004), a first prize at the Fiesole music school (2007) and a place in the Gustav Mahler International Academy for young orchestral players in 2007, working with Wolfram Christ. He plays a 1903 Cavallini bass, according to the biography posted by MITO Settembre Musica.

His jazz training began in 2008 with the Roma Jazz's Cool advanced course, where his teachers were Scott Colley and Salvatore Bonafede. From 2008 to 2010 he studied in the In.Ja.M. master program at Siena Jazz, with teachers including Rufus Reid, Riccardo Del Fra, Furio Di Castri, Eddie Gomez, Drew Gress, Hein Van de Geyn, Rava, Jeff Ballard, Tim Berne and Billy Hart. He won first prize at the 2008 Elba Jazz Contest with the Teen Quartet and was selected for the Panama Jazz Festival in 2010. A trio he formed at Siena Jazz with pianist Alessandro Lanzoni and drummer Tommaso Cappellato recorded in November 2010 but released the session only in April 2020, as HAT: The Legendary Lost Album.

The Rava connection is the thread of his career. He joined Rava's quintet in 2010 and recorded Tribe (ECM, 2011) that October at Artesuono in Udine, with trombonist Gianluca Petrella, pianist Giovanni Guidi and drummer Fabrizio Sferra. Wild Dance (ECM, 2015) followed in a quartet with guitarist Francesco Diodati and drummer Enrico Morello, Petrella returning as guest and Manfred Eicher producing. Edizione Speciale (ECM, 2021) was recorded live in August 2019 at the Jazz Middelheim festival in Antwerp by a sextet that added Guidi and tenor saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti. He is also credited on the 2017 concert film Note Necessarie and on the Dino Piana album Al Gir Dal Bughi (2021), which reunited Rava with Franco Piana and Gatto behind the 90-year-old trombonist Dino Piana.

Beyond Rava he has been the bassist of several long-running rhythm sections. With pianist Alessandro Galati and drummer Stefano Tamborrino he made six Discogs-credited records between 2014 and 2019, from Seals to Live From The Inside Out, most of them for Japanese labels. With Gatto and Lanzoni he made Replay (Parco Della Musica Records, 2012), one of the few records with his name on the cover, and he returned to Lanzoni's side for Vida (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2025), a trio record with American drummer Jeff Ballard. Pianist Simone Graziano's Frontal quintet with saxophonists David Binney and Chris Speed (and later Dan Kinzelman) gave him two Auand albums in 2013 and 2015, and Graziano's Sexuality (2019) a third. He is the bassist on Anokhi, Cristiano Calcagnile's trio with pianist Giorgio Pacorig, whose Inversi (We Insist! Records, 2022) was reviewed by All About Jazz, and he also played on Calcagnile's Multikulti Ensemble records Multikulti Cherry On (2016) and The Gift Of Togetherness (2019).

The D'Andrea trio is his most visible recent work. Something Bluesy and More (Parco Della Musica Records, May 2024) runs from W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" and Duke Ellington's "Caravan" to John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" and an original, "Exploration"; Marco Losavio's review for Jazzitalia singled out his bass lines. A live album from the Torrione Jazz Club in Ferrara followed in December 2025, and the trio played Vicenza Jazz in May 2025 on a double bill with Lanzoni's trio. In 2026 he is also on saxophonist Francesco Cafiso's Where It All Returns with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Outside the studio, his published biography names a 2016 SIAE prize for best young artist at the festival "Una striscia di terra feconda," concerts in the United States (including Birdland and the San Francisco Jazz Festival), Canada, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America. From 2017 to 2023 he taught bass and ensemble music at Siena Jazz University, and he now teaches jazz double bass at the Conservatorio Venezze in Rovigo. His biography also lists work with Kurt Rosenwinkel, Chris Potter, John Scofield, Dave Douglas and Stefano Bollani; none of those collaborations is itemized on Discogs.

Evangelista is a trio and quartet bassist whose work sits between mainstream post-bop and free improvisation. Most of his catalog is small-group contemporary jazz: piano trios with Galati, Lanzoni and D'Andrea, and horn-led quartets with Rava, Presti and Nico Gori. A second strand, on records by Calcagnile, Francesco Cusa and Graziano, is free-jazz and avant-garde; on Cusa's Sphere (2013, Try Trio) Discogs also credits him as co-composer of five tracks, and on Multikulti Cherry On he adds voice to his bass. His classical training is the base for the orchestral projects on his list, from Duccio Bertini's big-band Cromatos Project (2011) to D'Andrea's Sketches of the 20th Century (2023), where he plays in a large ensemble rather than a trio. His discography contains two pop-genre entries, Karima's No Filter (2021) and Francesco De Gregori and Checco Zalone's Pastiche (2024), neither of which changes the picture: 58 of 59 Discogs rows carry the Jazz tag.