Gianni Lenoci was a pianist and composer from Monopoli, on the Adriatic coast of Puglia, who spent three decades building a body of free-improvised and contemporary music from a coastal town far from Italy's jazz centers. He was born on June 6, 1963, and died on September 30, 2019, at 56, after an illness. His Discogs entry lists 43 releases under his own name or as a principal artist, and the Italian daily La Repubblica's obituary called him the jazz soul of Puglia.

His training ran on two tracks. He took a piano diploma at the Santa Cecilia conservatory in Rome and a second diploma in electronic music at the Piccinni conservatory in Bari, and he studied composition with Giacomo Manzoni. For jazz and improvisation he went to two American pianists, Mal Waldron and Paul Bley. From 1990 he taught in the jazz courses of the Nino Rota conservatory in Monopoli, his home town, and former students were among those who paid tribute when he died. He was a finalist in the European Jazz Competition in Leverkusen in 1993, won a prize from the Fondation Acanthes in Paris in 1996, took the Italian Society for Musical Informatics prize that same year for his composition Notturno Frattale, and received the Earle Brown and Morton Feldman Grant Program award in 2015.

His recorded career starts in the early 1990s with mainstream-leaning piano trio records for the Milan label Splasc(h). Blues Waltz, with Bruno Tommaso on bass and Antonio Di Lorenzo on drums, is dated 1991 on Discogs, and All In Love Is Fair (1998) used the same rhythm section. In between came a 1992 record with the alto saxophonist Massimo Urbani, Round About Max With Strings; a live quintet set from the Strange Fruit Jazz Club in Bari on December 19, 1992, released as Old Ground, New Ground with Bob Mover and Famoudou Don Moye as guests; and Existence (1996), a trio with the drummer Roberto Gatto and the guitarist Augusto Mancinelli. A reviewer of Existence singled out how closely his lines followed Paul Bley's scalar approach, which is a fair summary of where he started.

The 2000s pulled him toward freer forms. He recorded five records with the reed player Eugenio Colombo, among them Guida Blu (1999), Tales Of Love And Death (Leo Records, 2000) and Holysmoke (2007); played on Nicola Pisani's Dolmen Orchestra record Minotrauma (Leo Records, 2001); and appeared on trumpeter Pino Minafra's Terronia (Enja, 2005). With the bass clarinetist Carlo Actis Dato he made Entomology (Setola Di Maiale, 2002). Setola Di Maiale, a small label devoted to improvised music, issued 12 of his 43 principal-artist releases, and the drummer Marcello Magliocchi shares a credit with him on 25 Discogs releases, more than any other player. Bassist Joëlle Léandre is the other central partner: their duo Sur Une Balançoire (Ambiances Magnétiques, 2004) was followed by Psychomagic Combination (2007) and Panji (2010), and Magliocchi and the saxophonist Vittorino Curci joined them on the first two of those. Ergskkem (Silta, 2006) put him in a trio with the trumpeter Markus Stockhausen and the bassist Giorgio Dini.

At home he ran a working laboratory. In 2008 he composed and conducted Ephemeral#2, a record by the Hocus Pocus Improvisers Orchestra of about two dozen credited players, and its smaller offshoots, Hocus Pocus 3 and Hocus Pocus 4, with the bassist Pasquale Gadaleta and the drummer Giacomo Mongelli, became his regular working groups for the next decade. Guests came to Puglia to play with them: the alto saxophonist Steve Potts on Bucket Of Blood (2011), the cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum on Empty Chair (2013), the tenor saxophonist Sabir Mateen on Smiling Stones (2019). A duo with the soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo, released as Reciprocal Uncles (Amirani, 2010), continued until his death.

The busiest stretch was 2010 to 2014, when he recorded with a run of American players. Free Fall (2010) is a trio with the bassist Kent Carter, a veteran of Steve Lacy's group; Kid Steps (2010) is a trio with Potts; Serving An Evolving Humanity (Silta, 2010) is a quartet with William Parker, Magliocchi and Curci; and Secret Garden (Silta, 2011) is a quartet with Parker, the saxophonist Gaetano Partipilo and Magliocchi. Plaything (NoBusiness, 2014), a trio with Carter and the drummer Bill Elgart, was reviewed by John Sharpe at All About Jazz in April 2015, who heard a pianist who was variously lyrical, bluesy and adventurous with prepared piano.

Alongside the improvised records ran a second body of work in contemporary composition, on Amirani and Silta: One, his 2011 record of John Cage piano music; For Bunita Marcus (2013), Morton Feldman's single-movement piece for solo piano; and Selected Works For Piano And/Or Sound-Producing Media (2018), on Earle Brown's scores. Italian Wikipedia adds that he performed the complete keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. He also recorded Agenda (2005), a solo record of Steve Lacy re-compositions, and a Lacy piece, "Steve's Mirror," turns up again on No Baby (Dodicilune, 2017), where he is billed alongside the singer Tiziana Ghiglioni and Steve Potts. Wet Cats (Amirani, 2017) is a duo with the drummer Francesco Cusa, and Wild Geese (Dodicilune, 2020) is a trio with Gadaleta and the drummer Bob Moses.

He played his last concert at the Talos Festival in Ruvo di Puglia in 2019, and the solo record A Few Steps Beyond (Amirani, 2021), labelled "the very last concert" on its Bandcamp cover, was released after his death. Several other records came out posthumously, among them The Whole Thing with Mimmo (2020), Nothing with Franco Degrassi (2021) and HP4 + ZC (2024). A 2021 tribute record, A Secret Garden (In Gianni Lenoci's Music), was built entirely from his compositions by the singer Gianna Montecalvo with the saxophonist Roberto Ottaviano and Magliocchi among its players. The pianist Livio Minafra wrote after his death that his courage and consistency had seeded a lot in the people around him and that history had understood him even when some listeners had not.

One caveat about the catalogue: Discogs also credits him as writer and Hammond organist on "Bossa Per Due," a piece by Nicola Conte first issued on Schema in 1999 that went on to appear on roughly twenty lounge and bossa nova compilations. That credit sits outside the improvised-music work that defines his catalogue.

Lenoci's piano playing is rooted in the Bley and Waldron lineage: slow-building, harmonically open lines, deliberate silences, and a habit of finding a scale inside a melody and then working it from the inside. His trio records with Carter and Elgart sit closest to that sound. Around it he built a much wider working vocabulary: prepared piano, synthesizer and computer electronics (his diploma from Bari was in electronic music, and Sextant credits him on Csound), occasional flute and saxophone, and conducted large-group improvisation with the Hocus Pocus orchestras.

His debts show up in the repertoire. Steve Lacy is the clearest: Agenda is a Lacy tribute, "Steve's Mirror" recurs in his own writing. Waldron is honored in track titles such as "Mal Walking" on No Baby, and Cage, Feldman and Earle Brown are the other pole, treated as living repertoire rather than a separate career. Discogs tags 38 of his 43 principal-artist releases as Jazz, with styles led by Free Improvisation and Contemporary Jazz. The five exceptions are the Cage, Feldman and Earle Brown piano records and two electronic duos with Franco Degrassi.