Gabriele Mirabassi was born in Perugia on 16 September 1967 and still works out of the city he was born in. He plays clarinet, and he is one of the very few musicians of his generation to have built a full jazz career led from that instrument rather than from a saxophone.

He came to it through the conservatory, not through a band. Mirabassi took his clarinet diploma at the Conservatorio Morlacchi in Perugia in 1986, and his teacher's view of jazz was that it would damage the technique he had just spent years acquiring. He kept the two apart: jazz stayed at home, worked out at the piano rather than on the clarinet, played along to his father's records. His first professional years went entirely the other way, performing contemporary classical repertoire under conductors including John Cage and Gunther Schuller, and his earliest records reflect it. Tra '800 e '900 in Italia (Quadrivium, 1993) is a recital of Setaccioli, Martucci and Castelnuovo-Tedesco with pianist Raffaella Lisi, carrying liner notes by Massimo Mila.

The pivot is datable. In 1992 he recorded Coloriage with the French accordionist Richard Galliano, a duo with no rhythm section, and it put him on the European jazz map. Four years later the critics polled for the Top Jazz referendum run by Musica Jazz voted him best new talent of 1996, on the strength of Come una volta (EGEA), a quartet with Battista Lena on guitar, Gianni Coscia on accordion and Enzo Pietropaoli on double bass.

Two catalogues then developed in parallel. The Italian one runs through EGEA, the Perugia label that issued most of his work for two decades, and it is largely chamber music: Fiabe (1995) with Stefano Battaglia, Racconti mediterranei (2000) with Enrico Pieranunzi and Marc Johnson, Moon (2001) as guest with Kenny Wheeler and John Taylor, New Old Age (2005) with Taylor and Steve Swallow, Acquario (2004) with the Arké String Project and Stefano Bollani, and Basso profilo (2011) with Giovanni Tommaso and Simone Zanchini. His longest-running small group belongs to the same catalogue: the trio with accordionist Luciano Biondini and Michel Godard on tuba and serpent, which made Lo stortino (2000), 1 - 0 (Uno a zero) (2001) and Latakia Blend (Enja, 2002), and continued as a Mirabassi/Biondini duo on Fuori le mura (2003). He also spent the early 2000s inside Rabih Abou-Khalil's ensemble, on The Cactus of Knowledge (2001) and Morton's Foot (2003).

The second catalogue is Brazilian. It opens with Velho Retrato (1999), a duo with Sérgio Assad recorded in the sacristy of a Perugia church, and it becomes serious with Graffiando vento, recorded in Perugia across September and October 2003 with the Rio de Janeiro guitarist and composer Guinga and released on EGEA in 2004. Folha de S. Paulo, Brazil's largest newspaper, named it the best Brazilian instrumental album of that year. He has kept returning: Miramari (2010) with the pianist André Mehmari, Um Brasil diferente (2014) and Nítido e obscuro (2018) with the guitarist Roberto Taufic, Correnteza (2016) with Taufic and the singer Cristina Renzetti, and A testa in giù! (De cabeça para baixo) (2014), recorded live in Curitiba with the Orquestra à Base de Sopro, a Brazilian wind orchestra. In 2018 the billing reversed and Guinga invited him back for Passos e assovio. Choro is the connective tissue: a Brazilian form with a clarinet tradition of its own, and one of the few places where a jazz-trained clarinetist arrives already belonging.

Canto di ebano (EGEA, released 25 April 2008) is the record that closed the loop on the 1996 award. Recorded over three days at the end of December 2006 with Peo Alfonsi on acoustic guitar, Salvatore Maiore on double bass and Alfred Kramer on drums, and mastered at Sterling Sound in New York, it was voted album of the year in that season's Top Jazz. The title means "song of ebony", and the record is dedicated to the African wood clarinets are cut from and to the Italian workshops that shape it.

He remains active and is still adding formats rather than repeating them. Two duo albums with the accordionist Simone Zanchini, Il gatto e la volpe (recorded 2021, released 17 June 2022) and Un ballo con la luna (2023), came out on EGEA. Traveller's Ways (Challenge, 2024) was recorded at Hilversum in May 2023 with the Dutch bassist Jasper Somsen and Enrico Pieranunzi. In 2025 he released Intorno a me with the Metaphora Ensemble, a programme for clarinet and string orchestra built entirely from pieces he commissioned himself, produced within the Regione Lazio's LazioSound scheme.

Discogs catalogues 185 credits under his name, 47 of them as leader or co-leader. The labels track the arc: Quadrivium at the start, EGEA through the 1990s and 2000s, then Dodicilune and C.A.M. Jazz from the mid-2010s. He has never left the Italian independent sector for a major.

Mirabassi's central argument is about the instrument itself, and he has stated it directly. In a 2013 interview with the critic Gerlando Gatto he gave two reasons the clarinet fell out of jazz after the swing era, neither of them stylistic. The first is volume: as bebop drumming grew louder and more aggressive, the clarinet could not hold its dynamic ground beside a trumpet and a tenor saxophone in the same front line. The second is built into the tube. The clarinet's bore is cylindrical, so the register key raises a note not by an octave but by an octave and a fifth, a twelfth, and fingerings therefore do not repeat between registers the way they do on a saxophone. What a saxophonist learns once, a clarinetist learns twice. His own summary of the retraining that followed is blunt: "La mia grande fatica è stato questo: inizialmente ero totalmente inadatto a suonare altro". My great struggle was this: at the start I was completely unfit to play anything else.

That reframes the catalogue. The preference for small, quiet, drummerless formats is not nostalgia for a pre-bebop sound; it is the instrument being placed where it can actually be heard and can phrase at full range. The recurring shape is the duo, with Galliano, Battaglia, Assad, Guinga, Mehmari, Taufic, Biondini, Zanchini, Zanisi, and after that the trio with accordion and tuba, where the clarinet sits on top of two instruments that will not bury it.

The classical training never left either. It shows in the recital record of 1993, in the tone across the EGEA years, and most plainly in Intorno a me, where he commissions a repertoire for clarinet and strings rather than selecting one, a composer-patron's move applied inside a jazz career.