Gianluca Zanello is a Milan-based alto saxophonist and composer who trained in two places, classical music at the Milan Conservatory and jazz at ESMUC, the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona. His own biography describes a musician active across Italy and Europe who leads several projects, among them Yellowland Collective, Ùmia and Mòmo, and who has played festivals with the Federico Calcagno band The Dolphians, with bassist Ferdinando Romano, with drummer Francesca Remigi and in saxophonist Tino Tracanna's Panorchestra. Those last three collaborations come from his bio only; none of them is documented at the release-credit level.

The first of his own records came out of Barcelona. Yellowland Collective, a seven-piece band he leads, formed in Barcelona in the spring of 2017 and recorded his original compositions and arrangements in November 2017 at Estudi Laietana and released them as Yellow Loud Things in September 2018, with trumpeter Òscar Latorre Cascante, trombonist Tomeu Garcias Tur, guitarist Cristian Hernández Castellví, pianist Juanlu Garcia, bassist Mikael Saastamoinen and drummer Jordy Pallarés Barberà. The album closes with Dizzy Gillespie's "Con Alma"; the rest is Zanello's writing, opening with a one-minute-26-second "Preludio" that leads into "Acelgas." Honolulu Records of Milan issued it on CD.

In Milan he leads an alto, bass and drums trio with double bassist Stefano Zambon and drummer Stefano Grasso, billed as the Gianluca Zanello Sax Trio when it played the Corte dei Miracoli in Milan on June 3, 2021 (livestreamed on Twitch), where the venue's notice said the group sought to follow in the footsteps of Sonny Rollins at the Village Vanguard. The same lineup, renamed Ùmia, recorded Ùmia | Permanent Colors on March 22, 2022, with Dan Kinzelman engineering, and released it on Bandcamp on March 10, 2023. Zanello plays alto saxophone and whistle; three of the eight tracks are his compositions, one each comes from Grasso and Zambon, and the rest are Thelonious Monk's "Ugly Beauty," the standard "Tea for Two" and "Picture Me Better" by Natalie Mering.

He has appeared twice in the Scintille di Jazz showcase for young musicians at Bergamo Jazz. On March 19, 2022 he played it as alto saxophonist in Federico Calcagno & The Dolphians, and on March 20, 2025 he led the Kairos Trio at the Circolino in Bergamo's Città Alta, with keyboardist Filippo Rinaldo and Zambon, in two sets at 6:00 and 7:15 p.m.; the festival programme called the trio chamber-like, with artistic guidance for the series from Tino Tracanna. The Dolphians, whose 2018 sextet debut From Another Planet is a tribute to Eric Dolphy, were also among the ensembles supported by the I-Jazz Nuova Generazione Jazz programme in 2022, and Zanello is again the alto voice on the band's second album, Face the Music (Da Vinci Jazz Records, October 24, 2025).

Other sideman work runs through Milan's jazz scene. In 2018 he recorded alto saxophone on Lonely Woman (Caligola), the debut of bassist Roberta Brighi's L.W. 6tet, a sextet album of Ornette Coleman compositions; in 2023 he recorded with the Monique Chao Jazz Orchestra, whose album Time Chamber (Da Vinci Jazz, released September 2024) was recorded on July 12 and 13, 2023 at Officine Meccaniche in Milan. Discogs also credits him on saxophone on one track of The Flesh Of A New God (2023), an album by the Italian black metal band Bekor Qilish, the only non-jazz credit among his Discogs entries. He is the alto saxophonist in the sextet MutatuM founded by Zambon, with trumpeter Cosimo Boni, guitarist Enrico Galeano, pianist Guglielmo Santimone and drummer Simone Brilli, for which Aut Records lists a first recording, made at Artesuono, scheduled for release in autumn 2025. On August 23, 2025 he was the special guest with bassist Yuri Goloubev's trio (with pianist Simone Locarni and drummer Marco Zanoli) at the JAZZaltro festival in Legnano, and he also works as a duo with double bassist Marco Rottoli, whose dawn programme "Ancora all'alba" was scheduled for August 2, 2026 at 5:50 a.m. at Termine Grosso in the Val Trebbia.

His Discogs artist entry lists no biography text, and his birth date is not publicly documented.

Zanello's jazz sits in a modern, chamber-scaled post-bop idiom. His two leader records are built on short, melodic themes and open interplay rather than dense arrangement: the seven-piece Yellowland Collective gives him a horn section for written material, while the Ùmia trio strips the format down to alto, bass and drums, the instrumentation of Sonny Rollins's Village Vanguard trio that the Sax Trio publicly named as its model. The Ùmia repertoire mixes his own tunes with Thelonious Monk, a Broadway-era standard and a Natalie Mering song, and the band describes its music as sincere and new rather than as a style. As a sideman he moves between the Eric Dolphy-inspired sextet of Federico Calcagno, the Ornette Coleman repertoire of the L.W. 6tet and the large-ensemble writing of the Monique Chao Jazz Orchestra. His Discogs-documented credits are jazz, apart from the single black metal guest spot.