Luciano Caruso is a soprano saxophonist and composer born on July 19, 1957, in Turin. He moved to Vittorio Veneto, in the province of Treviso, in 1973, and has built his career in that corner of the Veneto and Friuli region ever since. He studied at the "Toti Dal Monte" music school in Pieve di Soligo and then at the "Dizzy Gillespie" school in Bassano del Grappa, and attended workshops with guitarist Renato Geremia (1977), vibraphonist Gary Burton (1984) and, most formatively, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy (1994). Setola di Maiale's own catalog copy calls him one of the foremost custodians of Lacy's legacy on the instrument, and he plays a curved soprano sax on most of his recordings.

In 1992 he co-founded Progetto Exit, a school of jazz and experimental music in Vittorio Veneto, with drummer Nello Da Pont. The partnership produced Sestetto Exit, a sextet whose sole album, Esprit (Modern Times, 1995), also carried bassist Giovanni Maier, reedists Marco Bellini, Paolo Springolo and Massimo Miglio, and Da Pont on drums. His earliest Discogs-documented leader session, Rumit (Caligola, 1996), paired him with Carlo Actis Dato on bass clarinet and Da Pont again on drums, plus guitarist Dario Volpi, and set a compositional pattern he kept for the rest of his catalog: original pieces alongside a jazz standard, here a Thelonious Monk composition. Rumit is also his only album confirmed on Spotify.

A trio he formed with keyboardist Giorgio Pacorig and Da Pont, recorded in 1998 in Belluno and circulated informally for years, was finally released as Bug Jargal (Aut Records, 2014); video artist Walter Del Cin, who projected visuals at their live shows in the 1990s, made the cover art. A separate working trio, billed the Luciano Caruso Trio, recorded Mask of the Time (Braxtone Records / MG snc, 2001) with drummer Yannick da Re and guitarist Riccardo Bozzetto. He also appears as a guest on Da Pont's own Ecosistema (Nota, 2000), again alongside Maier, and on flutist Massimo De Mattia's ambitious Schiele (Jazz Oratorio) (Splasc(H), 2003): a duo track, "Due Voci / Two Voices," with tuba player Maurizio Cepparo, and a large-ensemble piece, "Città Morta / Dead City," that also credits Maier, Pacorig and clarinetist Daniele D'Agaro. He returned to De Mattia's music on the trio track "Anémic Musique," from Skin (Caligola, 2015), alongside vibraphonist Luigi Vitale.

With Vitale he also made a full duo album, Tripterygion (Aut Records, 2011), of soprano saxophone and vibraphone improvisation; the label describes the pair as having "met on the frontier land of improvised music." Two further duo albums, not listed on Discogs but documented on HoaxHobo Records' own Bandcamp page, capture the same one-on-one format: Ulrica (2014), a live 1999 concert with Pacorig on piano at the Church of S. Maria in Monte di Fogliano Redipuglia, recorded to tape by Giovanni Maier, and Alimurgia (2020), a studio session with pianist Nicola Guazzaloca in Bologna. A working quartet with baritone saxophonist Ivan Pilat, bassist Fred Casadei and drummer Stefano Giust made the free-improvised Apnea (Setola di Maiale, 2016), recorded live at Cantina Cenci in Tarzo.

His most sustained project since 2016 is "Links, a Perceptive Flow Approach to Music," a series of compositions for reed quartet built on a personal graphic-notation system of points and lines: +3 Links n° 2 (Setola di Maiale, 2016), a trio with Pilat and bass clarinetist Alberto Collodel, and +4 Links N° 3 - Will (Setola di Maiale, 2018), a quartet adding alto saxophonist Walter Vitale and tenor saxophonist Lorenzo De Luca. A live recording of the quartet from Slovenia's Brda Contemporary Music Festival was issued as +4 Links - Will - Live on HoaxHobo Records in 2022. In the mid-2010s he also crossed into electronic music, credited for mixing on John Pil's Theory of Turbulence (Hoaxhobo, 2015).

Bios describe him as having performed with reedists Gianluigi Trovesi and Carlo Actis Dato among his wider circle of collaborators, though only the Actis Dato connection is documented on a specific Discogs release (Rumit); the Trovesi association is not independently confirmed. Caruso entered Musica Jazz magazine's "Top Jazz" new-talent poll in 1998 and was placed among the ranking's top spots in the following years. He currently directs the Banda Comunale della Città di Vittorio Veneto, the town's municipal concert band, and is a member of the Phophonix Orchestra. He is not related to the Italian visual poet, critic and artist of the same name, Luciano Caruso (1944-1990).

Caruso's playing is built around the curved soprano saxophone and traces directly back to Steve Lacy, whose 1994 workshop he singles out as the most important of his formative encounters; label copy for his catalog calls him one of the instrument's leading Italian interpreters in Lacy's line. His writing runs on two tracks. The trio and quartet records for reeds, especially the "Links" series, follow a compositional method of his own devising, using points and lines as a graphic notation for group improvisation and structured melody together. The duo records with vibraphonist Luigi Vitale and pianists Giorgio Pacorig and Nicola Guazzaloca sit at the more open, free-improvised end of the same practice, two instruments trading phrases with little pre-set material. Across both, the Discogs genre and style tags on his catalog read Jazz throughout, with Free Jazz, Free Improvisation and Contemporary Jazz as the recurring styles, a straight line from the Progetto Exit workshop tradition he helped start in Vittorio Veneto in 1992.