Maurizio Brunod is a guitarist and composer born in 1968 in Ivrea, in Piedmont, where he still teaches guitar at the town's Music Studio and runs summer workshops; he trained first in jazz guitar and then in classical guitar, earning a diploma from the Pavia conservatory. In 1987, as a teenager, he joined Enten Eller, the small-group jazz ensemble that drummer and percussionist Massimo Barbiero, also from Ivrea, had founded three years earlier. The band's discography, largely on the Turin label Splasc(H) Records, runs from Streghe (1987) through Elpida (2026, with guest reed player Gianluigi Trovesi) and includes a DownBeat monthly album pick for 1999's Melquiades, made with American saxophonist Tim Berne.

Alongside Enten Eller, Brunod built a parallel duo partnership with fellow Turin guitarist Claudio Lodati spanning three Discogs-documented albums over seventeen years: Appesi Al Filo (1994, C.M.C. Records), Blue Gulf Stream (1999, Splasc(H), adding French vocalist Pascale Charreton) and Reunion (2011, Caligola). One composition from that partnership, "Mostar," co-written by the two guitarists, has taken on a life of its own in the wider free-improvisation scene they work in and has been recorded independently by at least half a dozen other ensembles since 1999, among them Enten Eller itself and the Massimo Barbiero Silence Quartet. Brunod is also credited as co-composer of "Mostar" on Odwalla's Kratos E Bia (2002), Barbiero's percussion-group session that features American drummer Billy Cobham, though he does not perform on that particular recording.

His catalog under his own name runs in parallel with both bands: solo and small-group guitar records from First Step (1996) and Visionaire (1999) through Solo (2002), Alone Again (2005), Northern Lights (2009), Bad Epoque (2011), Duets (2013, a suite of duo tracks recorded with double bassist Miroslav Vitous, saxophonist Achille Succi, bandoneonist Daniele di Bonaventura, bassist Danilo Gallo and Barbiero across its running order), Acoustic Dream (2014), African Scream (2018) and Ensemble (2020, a quintet session with Di Bonaventura and Trovesi). More recently he has released Trip with the Lady (2022) and a sequel, Trip with the Ladies Chapter 2.

Since 2007 Brunod and Barbiero have also worked together as a duo and trio outside either of their main projects, running from Water Dreams (2007) through Jeux D'Enfant (2008, a quartet adding Di Bonaventura and saxophonist Enzo Favata), Marmaduke (2009, with violist Alexander Balanescu and pianist Claudio Cojaniz) and Kandinsky (2012, with harpist Marcella Carboni) to the trio Extrema Ratio, with bassist Gallo, on Extrema Ratio (2016) and Gulliver (2023). Brunod's own biography also lists partnerships with double bassist Miroslav Vitous, trumpeter Enrico Rava, saxophonist Javier Girotto, guitarist Ralph Towner and reed player John Surman; of these, only the Vitous duo and a joint Enten Eller appearance alongside Girotto on Ecuba (2010) are documented at the Discogs credit level, while the Rava, Towner and Surman connections rest on his own biography rather than a shared recording credit, noted here with that caveat.

He is also a member or duo partner in several smaller Discogs-documented projects, including the Italian Guitars Trio, Kintsugi (a duo with guitarist Lorenzo Cominoli, 2017) and Nostalgia Progressiva (2018, with vocalist Boris Savoldelli and trumpeter Giorgio Li Calzi). He has published a guitar-technique method, Manuale di sopravvivenza del chitarrista curioso ("Survival Manual for the Curious Guitarist"), has translated seminars given in Italy by guitarists Scott Henderson and Ferenc Snetberger, and has been placed among Italy's best guitarists in Top Jazz and Jazz It Award readers' and critics' polls.

Brunod works at the meeting point of two long-running formats: the composed small-group jazz of Enten Eller, where his guitar sits inside a frontline of trumpet, saxophone and double bass under Barbiero's drums, and a much larger body of duo and trio recordings built on close listening and real-time interplay rather than written arrangement. Across both, his instrumental range is unusually wide for a jazz guitarist: classical, acoustic, electric and twelve-string guitar, banjo, and, on his more electric-leaning solo and duo records, live sampling and looping used as a way of building texture on the spot rather than after the fact. The two-guitar language he developed over nearly two decades with Claudio Lodati, working acoustic and electric instruments against each other without a rhythm section, is the clearest single thread through his non-Enten Eller catalog, and it carries over into his other duo work, where he tends to look for a single strong voice to play off, whether that is another guitarist, a bandoneon, a double bass or a solo horn.