Giulio Corini is a double bassist and bass guitarist from Brescia, born in 1979, who has spent more than two decades as a leader and sideman in the improvising end of Italian jazz. Discogs lists 34 releases under his name, from the trio records of his own group Libero Motu to piano-trio dates, saxophone-led quartets and large-ensemble suites, most of them tagged Jazz and most recorded in the north of Italy.

He came to the instrument late and by way of rock. In an interview with the Brescia daily Bresciaoggi he described starting on electric bass around age 14 in a school rock band, taking lessons from the Brescia bassist Franco Testa, who introduced him to jazz. He graduated from the C.P.M. music school in Milan in 2001 with top marks and distinction, and his own biography names Dino D'Autorio and Attilio Zanchi as his teachers there. It lists further study with Testa, Giovanni Maier, Paolino Dalla Porta, Furio Di Castri, Piero Leveratto, Scott Colley, Drew Gress and Ben Allison; those are self-reported study credits, not recording credits.

The decisive years were 2003 to 2008, when he took part in the Laboratorio Permanente di Ricerca Musicale, the Siena Jazz workshop directed by pianist Stefano Battaglia. The workshop's own album, Out-Vestigation (Jazz Engine, 2009), was recorded on June 12, 2008 at Artesuono in Cavalicco and credits Corini on double bass with Battaglia (piano), Francesco Bigoni (tenor saxophone) and Emanuele Maniscalco (drums). At the 2004 Siena Jazz summer seminars he met trumpeter Enrico Rava and was picked for Rava's "Under 21" quintet, a young-musicians group that ran from 2004 to 2007; Corini himself points to the encounter as the turning point that made music his profession. Maniscalco's own profile names the same quintet lineup, with Bigoni and pianist Giovanni Guidi. That membership comes from the musicians' biographies and Bresciaoggi, not from a Discogs credit. In 2009 he won a scholarship to represent Italy at the meeting of the International Association of Schools of Jazz in the Netherlands.

Since 2005 he has directed Libero Motu, a bass, tenor saxophone and drums trio with Bigoni and drummer Nelide Bandello. It has three records: Libero Motu (2007) and Off-Site Meetings (2009), both on El Gallo Rojo, and Future Revival (2015, Auand Analog Album), a limited-edition vinyl LP of 300 copies recorded on January 28 and 29, 2014 at Sotto il Mare Recording Studios and produced by Corini. Off-Site Meetings widens the group to a quintet with a second drummer, Fabrizio Saiu, electric guitarist Maurizio Rinaldi and American saxophonist Dan Kinzelman. The same Bandello and Corini pairing turns up on No Leader (2007), a CD issued with an issue of the magazine JazzIt and credited to Bandello's group Leibniz, with Bigoni, vibraphonist Pasquale Mirra and a guest turn from Piero Bittolo Bon. Corini also wrote one of its tracks. In 2010 the two joined Battaglia for the trio record Da Lontano Era Un'Isola (El Gallo Rojo), which Corini and Bandello produced, with all three credited for the music and guitarist Enrico Terragnoli credited with the mixing and editing.

Outside Libero Motu he plays in piano-trio and quartet formats across northern Italy. In 2007 he recorded guitarist Francesco Saiu's Nasciri (released 2008) with Battaglia, and he is on the bass chair for tenor saxophonist Felice Clemente's Blue of Mine (2009), Nuvole Di Carta (2011) and Mino Legacy (2017), with drummer Massimo Manzi on all three and guitarist Bebo Ferra on the first. He has recorded repeatedly with saxophonists Tino Tracanna and Massimiliano Milesi, in the quartet Double Cut (Double Cut, UR Records, 2016, with drummer Filippo Sala; Mappe, Parco della Musica, 2018) and Tracanna's trio album Distilled (2020).

The next decade added a run of records with Maniscalco: Something Out Of Nothing (Caligola, 2018), a trio with pianist Roberto Soggetti billed as Soon and recorded on December 18 and 19, 2016 in Castrezzato near Brescia, and The Boy Next Door (Ritmo&Blu, 2021), a guitar trio with Sandro Gibellini recorded live straight to analogue tape on October 20 and 21, 2020. Other sessions include trumpeter Giovanni Falzone's Pianeti Affini (C.A.M. Jazz, 2017) with accordionist Fausto Beccalossi and trombonist Filippo Vignato; trumpeter Gabriele Mitelli's Hymnus Ad Nocturnum (2014) with pianist Alfonso Santimone and Bandello; and, with Santimone and Bandello again, saxophonist Andrea Ayassot's Live In Lugano (2024). On guitarist Eleonora Strino's quartet album Matilde (C.A.M. Jazz, 2025) he plays double bass with pianist Claudio Vignali and drummer Zeno De Rossi. Duo Imperfetto (2022), his duo with violinist Daniele Richiedei, was recorded between January and May 2019 and brings in guests including Beccalossi, Strino, vibraphonist Andrea Dulbecco and Maniscalco on synthesizer.

He also works in wider settings. He is credited on Marco Tiraboschi's In A New World (Da Vinci Jazz, 2024) with guitarist Marc Ribot and saxophonist Javier Girotto, on pianist Michele Francesconi's trio suite record Seasons (Caligola, 2025) and on the ensemble suite Musiche Invisibili (Da Vinci Jazz, 2023) by Andrea Ruggeri, on which Saiu and Mitelli also play. A few of his sessions sit on the edge of jazz, such as the Jazz-and-Pop tagged Boats On The Terrace (2017) by the Betty Vittori 5et and Filippo Villa's Storielle Dispari (2019), which Discogs files under Pop.

He teaches jazz bass and ensemble music at the C.P.M. in Milan and bass, double bass, improvisation and ensemble music at the Accademia Musical-Mente in Brescia. He has described the Brescia jazz scene as fragmented, with venues but no central hub. His own biography lists collaborations with Rava, John Abercrombie, Francesco Bearzatti, Battaglia, Ralph Alessi, Jim Snidero, Gibellini, Tracanna, Ferra, Garrison Fewell, Harris Eisenstadt and Simone Guiducci; the Battaglia, Alessi, Gibellini, Tracanna, Ferra and Guiducci ones are confirmed by Discogs credits (Alessi and Guiducci on That's All Folks, 2011), the others are self-reported.

Corini's records move between free improvisation and the song-form playing of a piano trio. Discogs tags the Libero Motu and Einfalt records Free Improvisation, the two Double Cut records Free Jazz and Avant-Garde Jazz, and most of his other sessions Contemporary Jazz, a tag that here covers post-bop small-group playing with an open, exploratory edge. His repertoire runs from standards such as "Somebody Loves Me" on The Boy Next Door and "It Never Entered My Mind" and "Skylark" on Future Revival to originals by Bandello, Tracanna and Falzone and to a Mingus and Joni Mitchell songbook on Martha J. and Chebat Quartet's Amelia (2024). His teachers and workshop leaders point to two lines: the Italian improvising school around Battaglia, Maier and Di Castri, and the American modern-jazz bass tradition he studied through Colley, Gress and Allison.