Massimiliano Milesi is a tenor and soprano saxophonist, composer and improviser from Bergamo, born there on January 15, 1983. He trained at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan under tenor saxophonist Tino Tracanna, a formative relationship that shaped both his sound and his career: the two share an interest in the tonal qualities of older, vintage tenor saxophones, and their meeting in the conservatory's jazz department eventually produced a working band. Milesi made his recorded debut in 2012 playing in trumpeter Giovanni Falzone's projects, and has been based in the Bergamo-Brescia jazz scene ever since.

In 2015 he and Tracanna founded Double Cut, a pianoless quartet completed by bassist Giulio Corini and drummer Filippo Sala; its self-titled album (UR Records, 2016) earned a track's place on Musica Jazz's Top Jazz 2016 critics' poll compilation the following year, and the quartet followed it with a second album, Mappe (Parco Della Musica Records, 2018). The same period produced two duo records: Dimidiam (UR Records, 2015), a tenor-saxophone-and-electric-bass conversation with bassist Giacomo Papetti, and Astounding Stories Of Love And Outer Space (Bunch Records, 2016), a co-composed electroacoustic duo billed "Milesi:Merlin=Merlin:Milesi" with guitarist and electronics player Enrico Merlin. Milesi and Merlin also both play in Molester sMiles, whose Social Music (2016) adds clarinetist Achille Succi and Papetti to the same circle of Brescia-area improvisers.

His first record as a solo-billed leader, Oofth (AUAND, 2019), paired him with Emanuele Maniscalco on Wurlitzer electric piano and synthesizers, Papetti on Bass VI and electric bass, and Sala on drums. Named for a fictional five-dimensional hypercube from a Walter Tevis science-fiction novel, the record drew attention well beyond Italy: JazzTimes called Milesi's playing "lovely throughout" and said he was "off to a promising start," while Musica Jazz's Enzo Boddi described a saxophonist who "refines tone and phrasing through subtraction," avoiding the busier soloing common among his technically skilled peers. The album's electric, rock-attentive sound, which reviewers linked to English jazz-rock groups like Nucleus and Soft Machine as much as to Miles Davis-era fusion, reflects a duality Milesi has kept across his catalogue between acoustic and electric, and between jazz and rock vocabularies.

Milesi has also built a long-running life as an ensemble player outside his own leader dates. Since 2014 he has been a member of American composer Wayne Horvitz's European Orchestra, documented on the large-ensemble live album Live At The Bimhuis (Novara Jazz Series, 2019) alongside bassist Danilo Gallo. Since 2016 he has been a permanent member of Take Off, a Brescia-based ensemble founded by the Fondazione Teatro Grande, composer Mauro Montalbetti and Maniscalco to work the border between contemporary composition and free improvisation, alongside Papetti, Corini and other members of the same circle. He is also a regular member of Danilo Gallo's band Dark Dry Tears, appearing with saxophonist Francesco Bigoni and American drummer Jim Black on Hide, Show Yourself! (Parco Della Musica Records, 2020) and A View Through A Slot (Clean Feed, 2021).

The pandemic years produced some of his most personal work. Reithia (Jazz on The Road, 2021), a quartet record with guitarist Francesco Baiguera, Corini and Sala, was written during Italy's spring 2020 lockdown and recorded live at that year's Jazz on The Road festival in Brescia; named for a pre-Roman deity of rebirth and healing, it was conceived, in Milesi's own account, as a response to the losses Bergamo and Brescia suffered in the pandemic's first wave. Around the same time he took part in When? (UR-Kestra, 2020), a collective record built entirely from home recordings by the UR Records roster during lockdown, notable for guest appearances by American trumpeters Dave Douglas and Steven Bernstein alongside Papetti and Sala; its proceeds went to Bergamo's Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital.

Milesi's discography runs to more than two dozen Discogs-documented credits as a leader, co-leader and sideman, the great majority of them tagged Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz or Free Improvisation on Discogs. A small number of guest credits sit outside jazz - a punk record for the band The Peawees, a rockabilly session for Faz Waltz, a surf-and-Americana date with Guano Padano, and an early 2005 pop session for the singer Yuyu - and are disclosed here rather than folded into his jazz work.

Milesi's playing is defined by restraint rather than density: reviewers of Oofth singled out his willingness to leave space in a solo and to work with tone and phrasing rather than technical display, a quality Musica Jazz described as a "poetics of subtraction." That approach sits inside a catalogue that moves comfortably between acoustic post-bop lineages and electric, rock-informed textures - JazzTimes heard both "modern heavy metal and early fusion" and "a great, slow rock song" on the same Oofth record, and reviewers have drawn a line from his Double Cut and Dimidiam-era acoustic duo and quartet work through to Oofth's Wurlitzer-and-synthesizer sound, citing Radiohead, Nirvana and Sigur Ros as generational touchstones alongside the electric innovations of Miles Davis, Josef Zawinul and Herbie Hancock. His training under Tino Tracanna also shows up as a specific, shared interest in the sound of vintage tenor saxophones, something a 2016 Bergamo Jazz review noted the two players have in common. Across his many ensemble memberships - Take Off, the Wayne Horvitz European Orchestra, Dark Dry Tears - he has built a career less around a single working band than around a wide, overlapping network of Bergamo and Brescia-area improvisers he returns to on record after record.