Gaspare Palazzolo is a Palermo tenor and soprano saxophonist, composer and teacher who has been a featured saxophone soloist in the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana since 2003. He studied at the Conservatorio "V. Bellini" in Palermo, earning a saxophone diploma on 19 September 2000 and a jazz diploma on 24 June 2005. His own account of his training starts in 1987 with soprano saxophone lessons from Michele Cuti, a clarinetist and saxophonist in the orchestra of Palermo's Teatro Massimo, followed in 1989 by tenor saxophone with Gaetano Costa. In 1998 he attended the Siena Jazz international seminars, studying with Enrico Rava, Pietro Tonolo, Claudio Fasoli, Giancarlo Gazzani and Stefano Zenni, and in 2000 he took the Berklee summer course at Umbria Jazz with saxophonist Dino Govoni. In 2005 he moved to Rome to study with Maurizio Giammarco.

Two ensembles anchored his early professional years. In 2001 he joined Marvi La Spina's Macchina di Suoni orchestra as tenor soloist, playing a 2002 concert marking the anniversary of Charles Mingus at the Spasimo in Palermo and appearing on the 2003 album Oboe Sommerso (Dischi della Quercia). In 2003 he joined the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana, the Brass Group's big band, and that summer played its concerts with Dianne Reeves at Palermo's Teatro Massimo and Patti Austin at the Teatro di Verdura. His faculty biography lists later orchestra dates with Stefano Bollani, Eumir Deodato, Martial Solal, Phil Woods, Peter Erskine and Diane Schuur, among others; these are his own listings and are not independently documented in credits. The orchestra recorded Music & Wine Live (2007, Duplison) with the Donnafugata winery and the visiting American guests Eliot Zigmund (drums) and Bill Moring (bass); Discogs credits him on saxophone alongside section mates Antonino Pedone and Francesco Marchese, with Domenico Riina among the arranger-conductors. On 24 September 2026 he was one of the soloists in the orchestra's program at the Teatro Massimo, playing Stefano Di Battista's "The Other Side".

From 2004 he was tenor and soprano soloist of Accabbanna, the group built around bassist Piero Leveratto and the singer Olivia Sellerio that reworks Sicilian songs in a jazz setting. Its 2005 album Accabbanna (EGEA) credits him on tenor and soprano saxophone, and by his listing the group played the Siena Jazz Festival (2005), the Barcelona and Baku jazz festivals (2006) and the Volterra Jazz Festival (2007). He is also a recurring sideman on the Palermo scene of bassist Luca Lo Bianco, with whom he recorded La scomparsa di Majorana (2006) and Ear Catcher (2009), and of pianist Mauro Schiavone, on whose UFO (2013) he plays tenor. On the free-improvisation side, Discogs credits him on tenor saxophone in Naked Musicians, the large ensemble conducted by drummer Francesco Cusa, on A Sicilian Way Of Cooking Mind (2005, Improvvisatore Involontario).

Beyond jazz proper, he toured with the Sicilian singer-songwriter Pippo Pollina from 2006, including a 2007 live recording of Pollina's Ultimo Volo - Orazione Civile Per Ustica, on which he plays saxophone and flute as a member of the Palermo Acoustic Quartet. Discogs lists him on saxophone on the 2009 Philology album Italian Songs, led by the singer Flora Faja with Fabrizio Bosso and Francesco Cafiso as featured guests, and on soprano saxophone on Ruggiero Mascellino's The Seasons (2022, Da Vinci Jazz).

His most personal project is the Trio Argo, formed in 2013 with double bassist Massimo Patti and guitarist and violinist Enrico Tobia Vaccaro. Its repertoire, mostly original, reworks Sicilian folk traditions with jazz, pop and contemporary-classical vocabulary; the trio presented its CD Zisa at La Feltrinelli in Palermo on 9 January 2014. Under his own name he has a 2024 streaming release, the EP L'isola della formica, and a single, "Nora's dreams". He also leads a Gaspare Palazzolo Quartet and Quintet in Sicilian festivals and clubs, and has played with a long list of visiting artists that includes Ernie Watts, Gregory Hutchinson, Phil Woods, Gabriele Mirabassi and Bebo Ferra, all from his own performance listing.

He taught jazz improvisation techniques in the undergraduate and graduate jazz courses of the Palermo conservatory for the 2010/11, 2011/12 and 2012/13 academic years, and since 2015/16 has taught saxophone at the Liceo Musicale "Vito Fazio Allmayer" in Alcamo, in the province of Trapani. His birth date and birthplace are not publicly documented.

Palazzolo is a big-band section soloist and a chamber-scale improviser rather than a bandleader with a long leader discography. His tenor and soprano work sits in the Italian mainstream and orchestral tradition of the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana, where the repertoire runs from Ernie Wilkins and Quincy Jones to Stevie Wonder and Phil Collins, but his own projects lean toward Sicilian song: Accabbanna and Trio Argo both recast island folk material in a jazz vocabulary, which places him in the Ethno Jazz tradition. His Siena Jazz teachers (Rava, Fasoli, Tonolo) and his Rome studies with Maurizio Giammarco point to the post-bop mainstream as his schooling, while his Naked Musicians credit shows a willingness to work in large free-improvisation settings. He has also worked as a session saxophonist in pop-adjacent contexts, notably with Pippo Pollina and on a 2013 rock-pop album by Quelked Cesare, which is not part of his jazz identity.