Massimo Barbiero is an Italian drummer, percussionist and composer from Ivrea, in Piedmont, where he still lives and works. He studied drums and percussion locally with Fiorenzo Sordini and Giorgio Gandino, both percussionists with the RAI Turin orchestra, before going on to study with Jack DeJohnette, Steve Gadd, Peter Erskine and Roy Haynes and adding vibraphone and marimba to his instrumental range.

In 1984 he founded Enten Eller, a group built around drums, trumpet, saxophone, double bass and guitar that has released 17 CDs and a DVD across four decades on the Turin-based Splasc(H) Records. The group's 1999 album Melquiades, made with American saxophonist Tim Berne, drew a DownBeat monthly album pick, a recognition rare for an Italian group at the time. In 1989 Barbiero founded a second ensemble, Odwalla, a percussion-only group that has released 12 CDs and three DVDs and performed at festivals across Europe, Africa and beyond; Odwalla's Kratos E Bia (2002) features American drummer Billy Cobham alongside Barbiero, credited on marimba, vibraphone, gongs and gamelan percussion on the same session.

Barbiero has led or co-led a long line of duo and trio recordings outside Enten Eller and Odwalla, most often with guitarist Maurizio Brunod, a partner on more than a dozen albums since Water Dreams (2007), including the trio Extrema Ratio with bassist Danilo Gallo and Marmaduke (2009) with violinist Alexander Balanescu and pianist Claudio Cojaniz. He has also recorded a series of duo albums with bassist and cellist Giovanni Maier (Code Talkers, 2011; Gojn, 2020), a duo album with Cojaniz alone (Danza Pagana, 2013), and, most recently, Stoicheia (2025), a duo with German trumpeter Markus Stockhausen. Several of his other projects, including the quartet Massimo Barbiero Silence Quartet and the group Claudio Lodati Dac'corda, share members with Enten Eller, among them guitarist Claudio Lodati and Cojaniz. In 2026 Enten Eller released Elpida, a session with guest reed player Gianluigi Trovesi and, on trumpet and flugelhorn, Alberto Mandarini.

Away from his own groups, Barbiero appears as a session and guest percussionist on recordings led by other Italian improvisers, among them Carlo Actis Dato's Dune (1991) and Corsari (1991), a session credited to Claudio Lodati Dac'corda featuring Antonello Salis and Maria Pia De Vito. He has been voted among Italy's best drummers in reader and critic polls run by Musica Jazz and the JazzIt Award, is cited in the Penguin Guide to Jazz and Italian jazz reference works, and is endorsed by UFIP cymbals and Le Soprano drums. Alongside performing, Barbiero is president of the Ivrea Jazz Club and artistic director of the city's Open Papyrus Jazz Festival and Open World Jazz Festival, a dual role as musician and festival organizer that has run in parallel with his recording career since the 1980s.

Barbiero works at the intersection of jazz percussion and free improvisation, building a vocabulary around an expanded kit that runs from drums and vibraphone to marimba, gongs, udu, bodhran, kalimba and electronic "wave drums." His two long-running ensembles frame the two poles of that vocabulary: Enten Eller sets his percussion inside a small-group jazz frontline of trumpet, saxophone, bass and guitar, while Odwalla strips the music down to percussion alone, foregrounding texture, timbre and collective pulse over harmony. His duo and trio work, especially the extended partnership with guitarist Maurizio Brunod, leans further into free improvisation, often built around literary or philosophical themes drawn from writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche and Mikhail Bulgakov, whose texts and quotations appear directly in his album packaging. That same improvisational language extends to his cross-genre collaborations, from Billy Cobham's presence on an Odwalla session to more recent duo recordings with a classical-crossover violinist and a German trumpeter working in the European free-improvisation tradition.