Luca Flores was an Italian jazz pianist and composer, born in Palermo on October 20, 1956, the youngest of four siblings. His family moved to Mozambique in 1959, where he began piano studies at five; he returned to Italy in 1966, living briefly in Rome and Portugal before settling in Florence in 1972. There he studied at the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory, graduating with honors (10/10) in piano in 1981 after also completing five years of organ study, and went on to study jazz privately with Roberto Pichini, Marco Vavolo, Enrico Pieranunzi and Franco D'Andrea.

He made his national recording debut on the Tiziana Ghiglioni Sextet's Streams (1984, Discogs-verified), then led a run of his own groups through the second half of the 1980s: a duo with baritone saxophonist and bass clarinetist Bruno Marini, Riddles (LMJ Records, 1986); the Matt Jazz Quintet, co-billed with drummer Gianni Cazzola on Sharp Blues (Splasc(h), 1986, Flores also credited as producer) and released under his own name as "Where Extremes Meet" (Splasc(h), 1987); and the Luca Flores Trio, with bassist Raffaello "Lello" Pareti and drummer Piero Borri, on Sounds and Shades of Sound (Splasc(h), 1990). His largest studio production, Love For Sale (Splasc(h), 1993, recorded Florence, October 1991), assembled an expanded cast that included bassist Riccardo Del Fra, backing vocalist Barbara Casini, flautist Nicola Stilo, guitarist Riccardo Bianchi and American tenor saxophonist David Murray.

As a sideman, Flores is Discogs-credited on two significant live recordings from mid-1987: Massimo Urbani's Live at the Supino Jazz Festival 1987 (Philology, recorded August 6, 1987, released 2002), alongside drummer Giampaolo Ascolese and bassist Pino Sallusti, and Chet Baker's A Night at the Shalimar Club (Philology, 1991), alongside Furio Di Castri on bass and Nicola Stilo on flute. He also appears on Ettore Fioravanti's Coriandoli (1989, credited to Tiziana Simona and Riccardo Bianchi). Baker, whom multiple biographical sources describe as a mentor figure, died in May 1988; Flores had by then already been through his first psychiatric breakdown, in October 1987, and Baker's death is repeatedly cited as having deepened it.

Flores taught piano at Florence's Andrea del Sarto Institute from 1979 to 1987, and again from 1993, and led piano workshops at the Siena Jazz seminars from 1985 to 1987, where his students included a teenage Stefano Bollani. Severe mental illness, including repeated episodes of self-harm, shadowed the last eight years of his life. Ten days after a solo piano session at Planet Sound Studios in Florence on March 19, 1995 (part of what became For Those I Never Knew, released the same year), Flores died by suicide at his home in Montevarchi on March 29, 1995, at the age of 38.

A second, larger body of session tape from his final months, originally conceived as a large-scale project with African percussion, string and vocal ensembles reflecting his Mozambican childhood, went missing after his death and was rediscovered in an abandoned studio; it was released in 2019 as the double album Innocence (AUAND), produced by his brother Paolo Flores and mastered by Alessandro Galati. His legacy has been marked repeatedly since: Tiziana Ghiglioni recorded a full tribute album, So Long Flores (2004); his former Dreams collaborators Giko Pavan and Bruno Marini added two new tracks to a 2003 reissue of that 1987 session as a direct tribute; a 2007 biographical film, Piano, solo, directed by Riccardo Milani and based on a book by Walter Veltroni, starred Kim Rossi Stuart as Flores, its soundtrack pairing Daniele "Lele" Marchitelli's original score with a recording of Flores's own last public concert (with Pareti and Borri); and an award in his name, the Premio Luca Flores, has since been given to younger Italian pianists at the Barga Jazz festival and elsewhere, including Alessandro Lanzoni (2008) and Filippo Vignato (2011, as best soloist).

Flores worked in the postbop and hard-bop piano trio and small-group tradition, drawing on Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner among his stated influences, with reviewers of his surviving recordings pointing to precise time-feel and developed harmonic phrasing. His earliest working duo, Riddles (1986) with Bruno Marini, leaned toward freer improvised dialogue between piano and reeds, while his sideman dates with Chet Baker and Massimo Urbani placed him inside more conventional postbop and hard-bop small-group settings. Love For Sale (1993) is his most eclectic studio work, folding in vocals, flute and a large horn section around the core piano-trio writing. His unfinished final project, later released as Innocence, was explicitly conceived around music tied to his early childhood in Mozambique, intended at the time to involve African percussionists and a string and vocal ensemble.