Lucio Capobianco was born in Genoa on October 17, 1931. He had no formal musical training; drawn to jazz after hearing it in the years following the end of the Fascist regime, he was intrigued by how a trombone's slide could bend and modulate sound, bought an instrument, and taught himself to play. He was performing in Genoa's basement jazz venues before he turned 18.

In 1954, at 23, he founded the Riverside Syncopators Jazz Band, a Genoa-based traditional-jazz ensemble he led himself. The band built a reputation quickly, appearing at the Sopot Jazz Festival in Poland in 1957 and the Lugano Festival in Switzerland in 1959, and in 1960 it was named the best Italian traditional-style jazz group in a national listener poll run by RAI, "La Coppa del Jazz." That same year the band recorded "Alligator Blues" and "Sunset Cafe Stomp" in Rome; the tracks later surfaced on the 1984 compilation 30 Anni Di Jazz A Genova (Louisiana Jazz Records). Financial pressure broke the band up in the early 1960s, and Capobianco rebuilt a new lineup of the Riverside Syncopators to inaugurate the Louisiana Jazz Club's 1967-68 season, working alongside trumpeters Enzo Lotti and Cesare Vezzi, banjoist Egidio Colombo, pianist Francesco "Kiki" Valle, bassist Sergio Pavone and drummer Giorgio Montaldo. He also passed through Genoa's Quintetto Swing, led by pianist Flavio "Gasia" Crivelli.

In 1970 he co-founded the Genova Dixieland All Stars with trumpeter Fausto Rossi, clarinetist Lello Mango and pianist Armando Corso, realizing his ambition of a full-time local ensemble. Based at the Louisiana Jazz Club, which he considered his musical home, the group backed a run of visiting American jazz figures, among them Albert Nicholas, Bill Coleman, Bud Freeman, Wild Bill Davison, Kenny Davern, Dick Wellstood, Yank Lawson and Ralph Sutton. Discogs documents Capobianco on trombone at a 1971 Sanremo concert billed as Bobby Hackett With Genova Dixieland All-Stars, held in honor of Louis Armstrong and cited on the release as Hackett's first concert appearance in Europe, alongside Carlo Casabona, Lello Mango, Carlo Cibrario, Egidio Colombo and Armando Corso.

Capobianco's recorded work as a sideman runs from a 1969 date with Carlo Loffredo ("Musica + ... Musica -", DET Recording) through a 1999 Genoese-dialect record by Piero Parodi, on which he is billed under his nickname, "Lucio Capobianco 'le bon dieu.'" In between, he recorded again with Loffredo's New Orleans Jazz band on "Creola!.." and "Villa Tutto Dixieland" (both 1972, the latter backing mainstream vocalist Claudio Villa), appeared on the Milan College Jazz Society's "25 Years After" (1976, with Ralph Sutton, Bud Freeman and Oscar Klein), on a various-artists Louisiana Jazz Club Of Genoa live recording (1976) and on the compilation "Gli Anni Dello Swing: 1935-1945" (1977). In 1984 he played trombone on three tracks of the self-titled Paolo Conte album for CGD ("Come Di," "Sotto Le Stelle Del Jazz" and "Macaco"). His own featured-leader release, "Dixieland" (1982), was billed to the Riverboat Stompers Featuring Lucio Capobianco.

He joined the Milano Jazz Gang, an ensemble Italian jazz critics have called one of Europe's finest traditional orchestras, in 1984, and remained its trombonist across several documented tenures into the early 2000s; a detailed press account describes him remaining until a final concert on December 21, 2002, though the band's own published roster lists his service in discrete blocks (1984-85, 1986-87, 1988-90, 1991-92, 1993-95, 2000-01) rather than one unbroken run - both accounts agree he was gone from the band by 2002. In 1990 he also recorded trombone on the New Traditional Jazz Band's "Vol 1" (Contemporanea Multimedia) and on Lino Patruno's "Old America," where Lino Patruno plays banjo alongside him. Capobianco died on July 8, 2012.

Capobianco's musical identity, from the self-taught teenager drawn to the trombone's slide through five decades of Genoa- and Milan-based bandstands, was built entirely inside the New Orleans-revival and Dixieland tradition: front-line horns over banjo, tuba or bass and drums, playing the Twenties and Thirties repertoire (rags, stomps, blues) that defines the style. His own Riverside Syncopators and Genova Dixieland All Stars were formed specifically to bring that idiom to Genoa and to back visiting American originators of it in person, a role he continued for another two decades in Milan's Milano Jazz Gang and on session dates with Carlo Loffredo's and Lino Patruno's own Dixieland-revival bands. His one notable departure from that world, a handful of trombone tracks on Paolo Conte's 1984 self-titled record, sits inside a jazz-inflected chanson idiom rather than pure Dixieland, but it is a minor thread against a career otherwise spent entirely in traditional jazz.