Marco Bianchi is a Milan-based jazz pianist, composer and arranger whose four-decade career runs on two parallel tracks: a long-running acoustic piano trio built around jazz standards and original compositions, and a separate strand of downtempo and nu-jazz production for Bologna's Schema Records. His father, a songwriter in Milanese dialect, gave him an organ at age eight; he began formal piano study at nine, and around seventeen turned toward fusion and jazz, drawn especially to what he has called "jazz philosophy" - improvisation as a way of thinking rather than a style. He is largely self-taught as a player, having completed four years of conservatory study without taking a diploma, and cites Peter Nero and, later, Oscar Peterson as his formative influences on piano.

In 1984, at twenty, Bianchi co-founded a music school, the Centro Formazione Musica, in Corsico on Milan's outskirts, with drummer Giorgio Di Tullio; he has taught piano, harmony and improvisation for roughly forty years since. His first band, Everest, grew out of that circle in the 1980s with Di Tullio, saxophonist Stefano Colnaghi and bassist Silvio Verdi, and left two Discogs-verified albums tagged Jazz and Jazz Rock: the self-titled Everest (1990, self-released) and Around The Time (1994, A.V. Arts), the latter produced by, and featuring as a credited soloist, the veteran Italian jazz-fusion drummer Tullio De Piscopo.

Bianchi's more enduring project is a piano trio with drummer Maxx Furian and bassist Massimo Scoca, active in some form since at least the mid-1990s and described in a 2004 interview as "almost acoustic," built on close, real-time interplay. Under the name Soggetti A Rischio the trio released a self-titled album in 1996 (Discogs-tagged Jazz, styles Fusion, Contemporary Jazz and Latin Jazz); the same three musicians recorded Japanese Era in 2004 (VideoRadio, tagged Jazz) and later continued as New Trio One, with The Traveling Train (2011, Ultra Sound Records), and as Exploring Trio, with Exploring (2016, Ultra Sound Records) and a further album, Melodies (2019), not yet indexed on Discogs. These records draw on both original compositions and standards, including "My Favorite Things" and the Italian song "Azzurro."

Running alongside that acoustic strand, Bianchi partnered with producer Paolo Fedreghini in the early 2000s, first as the duo Paul & Mark for the downtempo/future-jazz album Officine (2003, Milano 2000, an Ishtar sublabel also home to Schema Records), then, billed as Paolo Fedreghini & Marco Bianchi, for a run of releases on Schema itself: the album Several People (2004, Discogs-tagged Jazz, with styles including Soul-Jazz, Bossa Nova, Post-Bop and Latin Jazz) and the singles Spread Your Love / Blu Night In Africa (2005), Circus In C Minor / Urban Savage (2005) and Several Additional Waves (2006), the last tagged Electronic with House and Future Jazz styles. Through that Schema-scene circle Bianchi is also Discogs-credited on releases by The Invisible Session, Rosalia De Souza and S-Tone Inc.

As a co-writer and arranger he has additional Discogs credits on recordings by soul-jazz singer Mario Biondi, including Handful Of Soul (2006), Sun (2013) and Crooning Undercover (2023), and on releases by Ricardo Montaner, Patty Pravo and Armenian Spirit. His own official biography also names collaborations with pop artists Laura Pausini and Irene Grandi; these are not independently confirmed at the Discogs credit level and are noted here as claimed rather than verified. He describes himself as a practicing Buddhist and credits the practice with reshaping his approach to performance, replacing pre-show anxiety with what he calls emotional authenticity.

No birth date or birthplace for Bianchi is publicly documented. In an August 2004 interview conducted in Milan by the Italian jazz webzine Jazzitalia, he gave his age as forty, which places his birth year at approximately 1963 or 1964; neither the interview nor any other source names an exact date or city of birth. Every documented stage of his career - the Corsico music school he co-founded in 1984, his working trio, his Schema Records collaborations, and his current teaching practice - is based in and around Milan, with no evidence of any period spent living or working outside Italy.

Bianchi's catalog splits cleanly into two idioms he has pursued at the same time for most of his career. The acoustic trio work, from the 1996 Soggetti A Rischio album through New Trio One and Exploring Trio, sits in a fusion-leaning, standards-and-originals piano-trio tradition, indebted by his own account to Oscar Peterson's example and, before that, Peter Nero. The parallel Schema Records strand with Paolo Fedreghini belongs to the Bologna label's own house style of downtempo, future jazz and nu jazz aimed as much at the dancefloor as the listening room, closer in spirit to broken-beat and acid-jazz production than to the trio's small-room improvising. Bianchi has argued publicly that jazz is "universal" and not the property of any one national tradition, a view consistent with a career spent moving between an acoustic Italian piano-trio lineage and an internationally distributed club-jazz scene without treating the two as contradictory.