Luca Piana is a Sardinian drummer and percussionist who has spent over a quarter-century inside one of Italy's longest continuously operating jazz orchestras. He plays drums and percussion in the Orchestra Jazz della Sardegna (OJS), a Sassari-based big band founded in 1989 as the Blue Note Orchestra and renamed in 1996, and has been a permanent member since 1999. Piana appears on the orchestra's current (2026) roster in its rhythm section alongside bassist Alessandro Zolo, pianist Mariano Tedde and guitarist Antonio Pitzoi.

Two of his recordings with the orchestra are independently confirmed at the Discogs credit level, both made under the direction of guest conductor Giorgio Gaslini: Sacred Concert / Jazz Te Deum (2002, Soul Note), on which he is credited on drums, and Il Brutto Anatroccolo (2005, Il Manifesto), credited on drums (batteria). Both recordings also carry a featured trumpet-soloist credit for Paolo Fresu and put Piana in the same credited personnel as reed player Dante Casu and French horn player Gavino Mele, both fellow OJS members profiled separately on this site. Over its history the orchestra has also worked with conductors and soloists including Bruno Tommaso, Carla Bley, Colin Towns and Bob Mintzer, though Piana's own presence on those specific engagements beyond his standing membership is not independently documented.

Alongside performing, Piana has built a parallel career as a percussion educator. He graduated in classical percussion and jazz music from the Conservatorio "L. Canepa" in Sassari, and has also performed in the classical field as an orchestral musician and soloist. He went on to teach jazz drums at the conservatories of Brescia and Cagliari, and since 2022 has held a professorship in drums and jazz percussion at his home conservatory in Sassari, where he teaches "Batteria e percussioni Jazz - prassi esecutive e repertori" at multiple levels.

No birth date or birthplace for Piana is publicly documented - not on Discogs (whose artist entry for him carries no biography text), not on Wikipedia in English or Italian, and not on AllMusic or All About Jazz, neither of which lists him. His documented public record is built from the Conservatorio "L. Canepa" di Sassari's own faculty page, the Orchestra Jazz della Sardegna's own materials via the Associazione Blue Note Orchestra, and the two Gaslini-era Discogs credits.

Piana's Discogs artist entity also carries one additional, non-jazz release credit, on the folk-world album Barbari (2003/2004) by the group Chichimeca; no individual personnel credit for him could be confirmed on that release at the extraartists level, and its Folk/World genre tagging places it outside this profile's jazz scope regardless.

Piana's musical identity is that of a section player and educator inside the large-ensemble jazz tradition rather than a leader or soloist with his own recorded catalog. His two Discogs-documented recordings both come from Giorgio Gaslini's large-scale sacred/orchestral jazz commissions for OJS - Sacred Concert / Jazz Te Deum and Il Brutto Anatroccolo - placing his own credited work squarely in the orchestral-jazz and big-band idiom the ensemble has built its identity on since 1989. His conservatory training bridges classical percussion and jazz drumming, and his teaching career at the conservatories of Brescia, Cagliari and Sassari extends that same big-band and jazz-percussion tradition to successive generations of Sardinian and northern Italian students.