Lelio Giannetto was a Palermo double bassist, composer and festival organizer who spent four decades making free improvisation a going concern in Sicily. He was born in Palermo on August 22, 1961, and died there on December 19, 2020, of complications from Covid-19, at 59. Obituaries called him a dreamer who carried a new aesthetic of the double bass around the world; he called his own playing a "speaking bass," and the description stuck to a solo show, Il Contrabbasso Parlante, in which he combined bass, spoken texts and stage antics.

He was self-taught and active on the jazz scene from the 1980s. He moved to Bologna, where he founded the Basse Sfere collective to promote innovative music and played international festivals alongside Fred Frith and Butch Morris. His earliest recordings are Sicilian free-jazz records with saxophonist Gianni Gebbia: Arabesques (Splasc(h), 1988), on which he plays double and electric bass and sings in Sicilian, then, in 1990, the Gebbia Trio's Zero In Geometria and Outland and the album Solo, Duets, Trio. In the same year he was one of the seven names on Pino Minafra Et... Quella Sporca 1/2 Dozzina, recorded live at the Polignano Estate Jazz festival in 1989 with Pino Minafra, Carlo Actis Dato, Antonello Salis and Bruno Tommaso, and he was the bassist in the Mama Quartetto with Actis Dato, trumpeter Jim Dvorak and drummer Marcello Magliocchi (recorded in Caltanissetta in October 1990, issued 1991).

He then studied the classical technique of his instrument at the Conservatorio Arrigo Boito in Parma, played with the Orchestra Sinfonica di Parma on tours of Bavaria and Switzerland, and after returning to Palermo in 1994 took a double bass diploma in Catania. He was also one of three double bassists, with Giovanni Maier and Luigi Lullo Mosso, in the Specchio Ensemble's Suite No. 1 Per Quintetto Doppio, a large-ensemble piece conducted by Domenico Caliri and recorded live at the Teatro delle Celebrazioni in October 1994, with Francesco Cusa, Guglielmo Pagnozzi and Fabrizio Puglisi in the lineup. Back in Sicily he added contemporary written music to his improvising: John Cage and Luciano Berio, the Sicilian composer Giuseppe Gagliano, work with the Zephyr ensemble and the baroque orchestra Les Elements, and a stint with the early-music department of the Conservatorio Vincenzo Bellini.

What made him a fixture was the organizing. In 1997 he founded Curva Minore, an association for the dissemination of innovative music, and served as its president and artistic director. Between 1997 and 2000 it staged a festival titled "Curva minore / pratiche inusuali del fare musica" and "Dreamin' California," a series of meetings between Sicilian improvisers and musicians from the California scene. One record documents that traffic: A Night In Palermo, recorded direct to DAT at Miao Studio in Palermo on December 11, 1998, by Gebbia, Giannetto, singer Miriam Palma, percussionists Tom Nunn, Garth Powell and Gino Robair, and bassist Damon Smith, issued in 2002 by Rastascan with Curva Minore as co-publisher. From 1999 he directed the contemporary-music series Il suono dei Soli, and from 2001 the seasons La Musica Attraversa/o I Suoni and Curva Minore Contemporary Sounds, which ran to a 23rd edition and built a bridge to Palermo's schools and university. He curated contemporary programs for the Teatro Massimo, the Orestiadi Foundation in Gibellina and the Goethe-Institut, directed the 2003 series Nuove Tracce - tra composizione e improvvisazione, and in 2002 was the only Italian in the European Improvising Ensemble that performed Cornelius Cardew's Treatise in a production by the GRIM center in Marseille. In 2010 Curva Minore published the volume Curva Minore Contemporary Sounds 1997-2007.

Curva Minore's own catalog carries two records of his playing. Diatoms (1998) is a duo with the American electronic musician Tim Perkis, filed on Discogs under electronic and experimental music. X-BASS is a live double-bass quartet with Mark Dresser, Gianfranco Tedeschi and Giuseppe Guarrella, recorded at Palazzo Branciforte during the "Jazz /not jazz" festival in Palermo on August 26, 2016, and released on Bandcamp on October 30, 2022. In 2013 he founded the Sicilian Improvisers Orchestra, a modular ensemble that at its largest can combine up to 50 double basses, and worked with bassist Barre Phillips in the group; the orchestra recorded Das Arbeitende Konzert / The Working Concert with the German composer Christopher Dell at Teatro Garibaldi alla Kalsa in Palermo on October 22, 2014, issued as two revisions in 2016. A March 31, 2019 studio session with pianist Thollem McDonas, violinist Alessandro Librio and flutist Eva Geraci was released on November 6, 2020, six weeks before his death, with all proceeds going to Curva Minore. His remaining credits range from Fred Frith's Stone, Brick, Glass, Wood, Wire (Graphic Scores 1986-96) (1999) to Teho Teardo's soundtrack Lavorare Con Lentezza (2004), the Palermo-themed album Storie by the Wegele-Sagner ensemble (2022), and RADICETERSA (2021), a trio with baritone saxophonist Tommaso Miranda and drummer Domenico Sabella issued after his death by Almendra Music and Curva Minore.

Outside jazz he wrote music for the theater, working with directors Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, Federico Tiezzi, Massimo Verdastro and Beatrice Monroy, and for dance with Virgilio Sieni; with director Salvo Cuccia and the California electronic musician Bob Ostertag he made Hortofonia, a multimedia performance. From 2004 he developed projects on soundscape, among them SOS Sounds of(f) Sicily, risUonA MUSICA and Suono Santo Subito, and he took part in Cento Sicilie, an archaeological-site performance inspired by Gesualdo Bufalino that involved about 50 artists. He led seminars at the University of Palermo's Institute of Music History, at the Teatro Massimo, at Sicilian secondary schools and at the Conservatorio Bellini, and in 2017 taught a master class of more than 300 students in Mexico City.

He kept working through his final illness. His son Luca told Sky TG24 that he had been in good health and could not stop, organizing concerts from his isolation room despite a high fever until his condition worsened suddenly and he was taken to intensive care. Drummer Francesco Cusa called him "il generatore di mondi," the generator of worlds. Curva Minore has continued under his family: his widow Valeria Cuffaro and sons Luca and Gabriele organize the annual tribute festival Solo per Lelio, whose 2023 edition ran from November 19 to December 19 with, among others, bassist Joelle Leandre, cellist Giovanni Sollima and the Sicilian Improvisers Orchestra. The orchestra and Thollem McDonas recorded Omnileliomatic, released on Curva Minore's Bandcamp on November 18, 2022 as a tribute to him.

Giannetto worked at the point where free improvisation, contemporary written music and Sicilian folk material meet. A Jazz'halo obituary describes a free-jazz bassist who blended minimalism, the contemporary European avant-garde and Sicilian folklore, and who insisted on extemporaneous improvisation. His own stated view, reported by the Osservatorio delle arti in Sicily, was that music works "come veicolo di comunicazione sociale," a vehicle for social communication, and that borders are meeting points. In practice that meant a bass that spoke, sang in Sicilian on Arabesques, played Bach and Scelsi next to Cage in Il Contrabbasso Parlante (Messina, October 29, 2015), and could be one of many basses in a 50-bass orchestra.

His discography reads as a list of encounters rather than a personal catalog of albums: the Sicilian free-jazz of Gebbia, the Puglia-based Minafra and Turin-based Actis Dato, Fred Frith's graphic scores, visiting American improvisers on A Night In Palermo, and the German conductor-composer Christopher Dell. Obituaries additionally list Ernst Reijseger, Jean-Marc Montera, Barre Phillips, Mark Dresser, Louis Sclavis, Alvin Curran, Sebi Tramontana and Joelle Leandre as collaborators. Only the credits documented on releases (see the Full Discography) are treated here as recording partnerships.