Gianni Gebbia is a Palermo-born saxophonist, flutist and composer whose work sits at the point where free jazz, free improvisation and Sicilian folk practice meet. Self-taught on the saxophone, he came to jazz through his mother's record collection and through the Brass Group, the Palermo club where he heard Ornette Coleman, Dexter Gordon and Charles Mingus in person; an uncle's gift of a saxophone did the rest. He played in Sicilian ensembles through the 1970s, and in 1979 or 1980 he moved to New York, where he came into contact with the downtown loft scene and no wave and studied informally with the alto saxophonist Muhameed Salahudeen. He also spent a short period at the C.I.M. in Paris with Jean-Claude Forenbach. In 1984 he took a philosophy degree at the University of Palermo with a thesis titled "John Coltrane: Liberation through Sound."

By the end of the decade he was a recording leader in Palermo: a self-titled solo LP on Sound Event (1987), Arabesques with trumpeter Pino Minafra as guest (1988), and Solo, Duets, Trio (recorded 1988, issued 1990). In 1990 the Italian magazine Musica Jazz named him best new talent in its Top Jazz poll, and the same year he played the Total Music Meeting in Berlin, the FMP festival, on a bill that his Discogs biography places alongside Steve Lacy and Lindsay Cooper. In March 1992 he recorded Cappuccini Klang in Palermo with the German bassist Peter Kowald and drummer Günter Sommer, two figures from the European free jazz scene. A second volume of unissued material from the same sessions came out on his own label in 2013.

Through the 1990s he built the band Terra Arsa with drummer Vittorio Villa and singer Miriam Palma; their live album Il Libro Degli Eroi was recorded at the Victoriaville festival in Quebec on May 17, 1997 and issued by Les Disques Victo. Around it he made a run of solo and small-group records for Splasc(h), Sound Event and Rastascan, including the solo alto album Body Limits (1996). He toured Japan, the United States and Canada between 1996 and 1998, and he directed festivals in Palermo (Curva Minore from 1997 to 2000, and Palermo di Scena in 1997 and 1998). He also recorded repeatedly in Oakland, California, and his biography lists teaching at Sonoma State College in 2000. Bassist Damon Smith and percussionist Garth Powell appear on People in Motion (1999) and A Night in Palermo (2002), and Powell and pianist Matthew Goodheart are his partners in the trio Zen Widow, which recorded with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith on Screaming in Daytime (Makes Men Forget) (2012).

The 2000s and 2010s spread his work across labels and continents. Pronto! (2002) paired him with sampler player Xavier Garcia and trombonist Nils Wogram on Intakt; The Williamsburg Sonatas (recorded 2001, issued 2005) put him in a trio with drummer Lukas Ligeti and bassist Massimo Pupillo; Maboroshi (2009) was a trio with the Japanese pianist and singer Eiko Ishibashi and bassist Daniele Camarda. He has spent part of each year in Japan since the early 2000s, was ordained a lay Zen monk in 2005. In Sicily he founded the Objet-a label, which has released his archive and new work, including Duos (2017), a live 1991 recording with Evan Parker, and he was artistic director of the Organica festival in Palermo from 2021. His more recent work includes The Mayfield (Intakt, 2024), recorded with Heiner Goebbels, Camille Émaille, Cécile Lartigau, Nicolas Perrin and Willi Bopp during a residence in Paris, and the solo album Sleep. He received the Premio Enzo Randisi for lifetime achievement in 2022, according to his own biography, and his Discogs profile records that The Wire ranked him among the leading solo saxophonists in 2000.

Gebbia's saxophone playing is defined by circular breathing, which he has said he learned in childhood from players of the Sardinian launeddas, a triple-pipe reed instrument played with continuous breath. His Discogs profile calls him one of the leading specialists in the technique, and it produces long sustained tones and the illusion of several lines sounding at once. Fred Frith, quoted on Gebbia's own site, places his playing in a line that runs from Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker back to that Sardinian tradition.

The lineage he cites himself is broader. He grew up hearing the players who passed through the Brass Group, saw Julius Hemphill and Arthur Blythe during his New York stay, and wrote his thesis on Coltrane; the philosophical training runs through his festivals, including the Anassimandro festival that mixed music with philosophical talks. Around the saxophone he adds sopranino saxophone, prepared saxophone, bansuri flute, soprano cornet, cracklebox and other electronics, and he has recorded music in forms that range from free-jazz trios to duo dialogues, electroacoustic improvisation, klezmer (with Full Metal Klezmer) and Sicilian song. Of the 98 releases on his Discogs page, 83 carry the Jazz genre tag and 48 carry the Free Improvisation style tag, and the 1990 Musica Jazz award places him inside the Italian jazz world's own accounting. Recordings such as Pattern Time and the Glen Velez collaborations show a wider, world-music-facing side, but they are the minority of his output.