Luca Tilli is a Rome-based Italian cellist who moved from a classical training into free jazz and improvised music. He studied cello with maestro Michele Chiapperino and, after early experience in orchestral work, redirected his concert activity toward contemporary music and improvisation, a shift shaped in particular by his collaboration with the American-Dutch cellist Tristan Honsinger. No birth year, birthplace, or conservatory name for Tilli is publicly documented on Discogs, Wikipedia, AllMusic, or any of the Italian and international outlets that have covered his records; his public record begins with his orchestral-to-improvisation turn and builds from there.

From 2005 his work concentrated on avant-garde and free-improvised music. He formed a standing trio with accordionist and keyboardist Luca Venitucci and percussionist Fabrizio Spera, and built a European festival network that has included trombonist Sebi Tramontana, percussionist Paul Lytton, double bassist John Edwards, vocalist Phil Minton, soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill and guitarist/instrument-builder Mike Cooper, the last as part of the trio R.A.S.T. with double bassist Roberto Bellatalla. In 2007 he took part in French-Basque pianist Katia Labeque's ensemble project B for Bang. From 2009 he has also worked in theater, performing with the Biancofango company and, under director Federica Santoro, on productions including Konya with the group Santa Sangre.

Alongside that improvising and theater work, Tilli has periodically crossed into rock-adjacent experimental music. In 2011 he participated in Zu93, a project pairing the Roman noise-rock trio Zu with David Tibet of Current 93, whose album Mirror Emperor (2018, House of Mythology) is Discogs-tagged Rock and Experimental rather than jazz; he also guests on cello, credited as a special guest, on The Left Hand Path (Trost Records), Zu's 2014 collaboration with vocalist Eugene S. Robinson of Oxbow. These are genuine but secondary threads in his catalogue, honestly outside the jazz genre by Discogs' own tagging, alongside a 2014 session credit on singer-songwriter Riccardo Sinigallia's pop-rock album Per Tutti and a 2024 cello guest spot on ambient composer Gianmaria Aprile's Autumn Is A New Spring (Shimmering Moods Records).

His most sustained jazz-side work began in 2016, when he formed the trio Kammermusik with trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini and saxophonist Errico De Fabritiis, an unconventional cello-trombone-saxophone lineup built on continuous, roleless improvised dialogue. Recorded in November 2017 at Abbey Rocchi Studios in Rome and released in 2018 on Setola Di Maiale, the trio's self-titled album sets nine group improvisations alongside compositions by Herbie Nichols and Misha Mengelberg and a reading of "'O Sole Mio," and the group expanded to a quartet with guitarist Jorgen Teller for Kammermusik & Elektrisk Guitar (2020, also Setola Di Maiale). In the same period he guested on cello, alongside organist and pianist Luca Venitucci and drummer Fabrizio Spera, on Roots Magic's Last Kind Words (2017, Clean Feed), a set of Delta blues standards reworked through a free jazz lens.

In 2018 he began a duo with Sebi Tramontana, recording Down At The Docks (released 2019, We Insist! Records) at Abbey Rocchi Studios; the label describes their dialogue as a genuine, four-handed conversation across strings, wood, breath and brass. He made his solo debut in 2023 with Empty Smile (We Insist!), sixteen brief, fully improvised pieces recorded in a single June session in Rome, exploring the cello through both orthodox arco and pizzicato technique and unconventional means such as striking the body of the instrument. The album drew reviews from All About Jazz, the Italian outlets Jazz Convention and The New Noise, and was read by critics against the lineage of jazz and improvising cellists such as Tristan Honsinger, Ernst Reijseger and Hank Roberts. In 2025 he extended the Tramontana partnership into the trio Flying Slippers, joined by British pianist and improviser Steve Beresford, recorded live in November 2024 at Cernusco sul Naviglio's Casa delle Arti and reviewed by Jazzword and Chain D.L.K.

Tilli is also the regular cellist in the "Pipeline" project, an ensemble led by clarinetist Giancarlo "Nino" Locatelli that has toured different repertoire under different billings: Prayer (2018, credited to Pipeline 8), a tribute to Steve Lacy with liner notes by John Corbett, reviewed by All About Jazz; Ahead Of July (2025, credited to Pipeline); and A Decent Run (2026, We Insist!, credited to poet Tom Raworth and Locatelli), a setting of Raworth's poetry recorded seven years after his death, also reviewed by All About Jazz. Across these three releases the same core group recurs alongside Tilli: double bassist Andrea Grossi, drummer Cristiano Calcagnile, pianist Alberto Braida, trumpeter Gabriele Mitelli and trombonist Sebi Tramontana, with singer-violinist Carla Kihlstedt added for the 2026 record. In July 2026 he performed a new duo, "Table Talk," with double bassist Federica Michisanti, reviving Tristan Honsinger's repertoire for cello and bass; this live engagement is documented in regional press but is not yet a recorded, Discogs-listed release.

Tilli's catalogue is genuinely split, and Discogs' own tagging shows the shape of the split honestly. Every one of his four releases issued under his own name or co-billing (the Kammermusik trio, the Tramontana duo, his Empty Smile solo record, and the Flying Slippers trio) is Discogs-tagged Jazz, with Free Improvisation, Free Jazz and Avant-Garde Jazz as the recurring styles; Empty Smile alone carries a secondary Classical tag alongside Jazz, the clearest single data point behind the "crosses into classical repertoire" description sometimes attached to him. His guest and sideman credits are broader and more mixed: several are jazz (Roots Magic's free jazz blues, the Locatelli-led Pipeline records), while others sit outside jazz entirely by genre (Zu and Zu93's rock/experimental records, Sinigallia's pop-rock session, Aprile's ambient/electroacoustic record). Taken as a whole, his own-name work is squarely jazz and free improvisation; his session work reflects the wider Roman experimental-music scene he moves through.

Critics describe that own-name work as sitting between idioms rather than settling into either. Reviewing Empty Smile for Jazz Convention, Giancarlo Locatelli wrote of Tilli creating "climi espressivi fra il classico-contemporaneo ed il jazzistico" (expressive climates between the classical-contemporary and the jazz-like), with arco lines that range from deep to piercingly high registers and pizzicato passages that adopt the walking, bass-like function common in jazz. The New Noise's review of the same record noted Tilli's music "proceeds by subtraction," with most of the album's sixteen pieces under three minutes, and placed him in relation to earlier jazz and improvising cellists Ernst Reijseger, Hank Roberts and Tristan Honsinger while stressing that his aesthetic remains his own. His technique folds orthodox arco and pizzicato playing together with extended techniques - striking the body of the cello, close dissonant double-stops, and other non-idiomatic sounds - in service of the improvisation rather than as effects for their own sake. The classical training that runs underneath all of this (study with Michele Chiapperino, early work in "stable orchestras" before 2005) supplies the technical foundation, but for two decades his performing and recording life has run almost entirely through free jazz, free improvisation and the Roman experimental scene built around labels like We Insist! Records and Setola Di Maiale.