Lanfranco Malaguti (March 20, 1949 - December 9, 2019) was a Rome-born jazz guitarist who built his career in the Veneto and Friuli and recorded mostly for Splasc(h) Records. He is best known for the trio he formed in the late 1980s with bassist Enzo Pietropaoli and drummer Fabrizio Sferra, and for a habit that ran through his whole discography: taking a small set of familiar tunes, standards or Italian pop songs, and rebuilding their harmony, melody and rhythm from the inside. Discogs lists 26 releases billed to him or to his own groups between 1984 and 2016.

He was born in Rome, graduated from the Sapienza University there, and grew up as a musician in the city. In 1978 he moved to Fontanelle, in the province of Treviso, where he lived until 2011 and worked as a mathematics teacher while playing jazz. Through the pianist Bruno Cesselli, based in Azzano Decimo in the province of Pordenone, he entered the circle of Friulian and Veneto players who would fill his early records. His debut as a leader, Orsa Minore (Centotre, 1984), was recorded in Bologna in February 1984 with a quintet of Cesselli, tenor and soprano saxophonist Maurizio Caldura, bassist Mario Cogno and drummer Andrea Michelutti. The sextet album Tip of the Hat! (Splasc(h), released 1987, recorded in February 1986) added flugelhornist Sergio Fanni and bassist Gigi Rossi. The town of Fontanelle made him an honorary citizen on December 9, 2016.

The trio with Pietropaoli and Sferra put him on the national map. Sound Investigations (Splasc(h), 1988) carries liner notes by Enrico Pieranunzi; Synthetismos (Splasc(h), 1989) was recorded at T2 Record Studios in Bologna in November 1988, with a second session in December; and Something (Nueva, 1989) is an album made up entirely of Beatles songs, with Malaguti credited for the arrangements. Italian Wikipedia calls Something his best-known record and notes that choosing pop repertoire over jazz standards was unusual at the time. In 1989 he won the Top Jazz award for best new talent in the Musica Jazz critics' referendum, and Italian Wikipedia says he placed first among guitarists in the same poll in 2011. The same trio made Azzurro (Sentemo, 1991), a set of Italian songs by writers including Adriano Celentano, Ennio Morricone, Luigi Tenco and Gino Paoli, each played once by the trio and once as a solo guitar piece. The Saint Louis College of Music jazz archive credits him as one of the first Italian jazz musicians to work with pop songs instead of the American songbook.

The 1990s were a period of changing partners. Campo Grande (Sentemo, 1992) and Inside Meaning (Splasc(h), 1993, all compositions by Malaguti) pair him with Pietropaoli and tenor saxophonist Stefano D'Anna. Percorsi is a live duo with pianist Umberto Petrin, recorded at the Tartini Palace in Pirano, Slovenia, on May 22, 1993. New Land (1995) is a guitar duo with Dario Volpi in which both men play guitar synthesizer, and Aforismi (1997) is a solo guitar record of 18 short pieces, recorded live by Malaguti himself on November 9 and 10, 1996. Parole, Parole..., recorded at Farm Studios in Cessalto in January 1992 and listed on Discogs as a 2000 Splasc(h) release, is a quartet of Malaguti, D'Anna, Pietropaoli and Roberto Gatto playing Italian pop songs including the title tune associated with Mina; Italian Wikipedia says some critics at the American magazine Cadence ranked it second among the year's jazz albums.

From 2001 he recorded with bassist Piero Leveratto and drummer Gianmarco Lanza (Trio "Live", recorded in Bollate near Milan on February 26, 2001, and Lanza's The Revival of West Coast Jazz, recorded on March 1, 2001, at Artesuono in Udine), and with the clarinetist Bill Smith (William O. Smith) on Bill Smith Meets Gianmarco Lanza (Helikonia, 2004) and Concert for Mirella (Mox Jazz, 2005). Between 2003 and 2007 he made three solo guitar albums for Splasc(h), White Christmas, Standard Obsession and A Gola Spiegata, which All About Jazz critic Angelo Leonardi describes as a long parenthesis spent alone. All the Days of April (2008) is a free-leaning trio record with bassist Salvatore Maiore and drummer Roberto Dani, recorded in Udine in February 1999.

His last decade was given over mostly to quartet records. Double Face (2009) and Visionary (2010) are quartet records with saxophonist Renzo De Rossi and drummer Luca Colussi, with bassist Federico Malaman on the first and Alessandro Turchet on the second. Panorami (2011), Galaxies (2012), Chrysalis (2013) and Papillon (2014) form a run of four albums with flutist Massimo De Mattia, alto and soprano saxophonist Nicola Fazzini and Colussi; a track from Panorami appears on the Musica Jazz compilation Top Jazz 2011. In 2014 accordionist Romano Todesco replaced De Mattia, and that group made Oltre il Confine (2015) and Why Not? (2016), on which Malaguti plays a guitar viola, a classical guitar, a guitar double bass, a guitar organ and a polyphonic octave generator. He also recorded Corde e Vocali (2010) as a trio with singer Maria Laura Scomparcini and seven-string guitarist Massimo Zemolin, and appears on the Trabucco Bros album Orchestra (2013), led by drummer Max Trabucco and his brother Marco Trabucco. His latest dated Discogs credit is the liner notes for Marco Di Meco's Against Capitalism Première Symphonie (2018).

Malaguti died in Viterbo on December 9, 2019, at the age of 70.

Italian biographies also name several musicians he worked with whose credits on his own releases are not itemized on Discogs, among them Lee Konitz, Franco Cerri and Ares Tavolazzi. Those are biographical claims, not release-level confirmations, and the sections below do not treat them as such.

Malaguti's core idea was to treat a standard as raw material. Leonardi's All About Jazz review of Why Not? (2016) says he approached standards by reshaping their harmonic, melodic and rhythmic features, likens his habit of returning to the same few tunes to Bill Evans and Lennie Tristano, and places his style within the rigor of Tristano's cool jazz. The same review notes that the tunes on Why Not? ("Solar", "There Will Never Be Another You", "Stella by Starlight", "The Days of Wine and Roses") were the core of Synthetismos almost three decades earlier, and recommends hearing the versions side by side. What changed over time was color: on Oltre il Confine and Why Not? he moves between several electric and acoustic instruments and heavy electronics, with results the review calls dazzling.

His quartet records from 2011 to 2014 go further into original material. All About Jazz Italy describes Galaxies as a complex, largely original exploration between tonality and atonality, acoustic and electric, composition and free improvisation, built on the spiral form of galaxies, and says Malaguti often prefers the role of director, supporting his partners with ostinato figures or steering them toward a change of direction. Discogs tags most of his albums Contemporary Jazz, with Cool Jazz on Azzurro and Free Improvisation on Aforismi and All the Days of April. The other constant is pop: Something, Azzurro and Parole, Parole... all use Beatles or Italian song material in a jazz trio or quartet.