Max De Aloe, born Massimiliano De Aloe on March 18, 1968, in Busto Arsizio, in Italy's Lombardy region, is one of Europe's most active jazz chromatic harmonica players. He grew up playing keyboards in rock bands before studying harmonica formally with Willi Burger and earning a 1993 degree in sociology from the Universita Statale di Milano, with a thesis on the sociology of music. He made his professional jazz debut in 1999 with the leader album La Danza Di Matisse (Jazz Music For Chromatic Harmonica), released on the Italian jazz label Splasc(H) Records, and has recorded steadily since, alongside a parallel career as an educator, festival organizer and label founder.

De Aloe's discography, verified at the Discogs credit level, runs to more than a dozen albums as a leader or co-leader and roughly forty further credits as a sideman, producer or guest, almost all tagged Jazz/Contemporary Jazz on Discogs and released on Italian jazz specialist labels: Splasc(H) Records, Abeat Records, and, since 2018, Barnum For Art, the label he founded himself. His core working unit for much of the 2000s and 2010s has been the Max De Aloe Quartet, with pianist Roberto Olzer, bassist Marco Mistrangelo and drummer Nicola Stranieri, heard on albums including Lirico Incanto (2008), Bradipo (2009), Bjork On The Moon (2012), Borderline (2014), Just For One Day (2020) and Melodic Monk (2024), a 2024 tribute to Thelonious Monk. He has also led or co-led duo and trio projects built around specific instrumental pairings: Apnea (2009) with the American pianist Bill Carrothers, Pop Harp (2013) and This Is Not A Harp. (as producer, 2020) with harpist Marcella Carboni, Mutamenti (2013) with cellist Marlise Goidanich, Valo (2017) with the Scandinavian-based Max De Aloe Baltic Trio, and Una Notte Di Coprifuoco (2021) with pianist Roberto Olzer. A 2018 trio session, Sospiri Sospesi, brought together three of the leading Italian free-reed instrumentalists: De Aloe on chromatic harmonica, Gianni Coscia on accordion, and Daniele Di Bonaventura on bandoneon.

Alongside his own catalog, De Aloe is credited as producer on a substantial number of other artists' albums on his Barnum For Art label, including releases by Bebo Ferra, Andrea Dulbecco, the Salvatore Maltana Trio and the Eugenia Canale Quartet. The press has recognized his playing directly: Musica Jazz and the Italian jazz press awarded him the Jazz It Award as best Italian musician in the "various instruments" category five years running, from 2014 through 2018, and his quartet album Borderline won the 2015 Orpheus Award in the jazz category. In 2024 he was named an honorary "harmonica ambassador to the East" at the Asian Pacific Harmonica Festival in Shanghai. His own biographical materials and press profiles also describe live and recording work over the years with musicians including guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, drummers Adam Nussbaum and Paul Wertico, Supertramp's John Helliwell, and fellow Italian jazz figures Paolo Fresu and Enrico Rava; Fresu himself contributed liner notes to two of De Aloe's own albums, Lirico Incanto (2008) and Sonnambuli (2018), both confirmed at the Discogs credit level.

De Aloe's teaching career runs parallel to his performing one. In 1995 he founded and still directs the Centro Espressione Musicale in Gallarate, where he teaches jazz improvisation, accordion and chromatic harmonica, and he later taught at La Scala's Accademia d'Arti e Mestieri dello Spettacolo in Milan. He founded and directed the Gallarate Jazz Festival from 2003 to 2015 and currently directs the Mutamenti festival; since 2016 he has also taught at the Nuoro Jazz summer seminars in Sardinia. He has published instructional methods for chromatic harmonica in Italian and English, the English edition issued by the American publisher Sher Music, and serves as an official endorser for Easttop harmonicas.

De Aloe's music sits in a melodic, chamber-scaled strain of contemporary jazz built around the chromatic harmonica's vocal, legato tone rather than the blues-harp idiom most listeners associate with the instrument. His regular quartet format, harmonica with piano, double bass and drums, favors lyrical original compositions and standards reworked at a conversational scale, and his catalog returns often to literary and cinematic source material: La Danza Di Matisse takes its title from Henri Matisse's painting, Apnea sets music to the Haruki Murakami novels he and Bill Carrothers read together, and Un Controcanto In Tasca (2011) is a spoken-and-played stage piece narrating the history of the harmonica itself. His duo and trio records with cello (Marlise Goidanich), harp (Marcella Carboni), and fellow free-reed players accordion and bandoneon (Gianni Coscia and Daniele Di Bonaventura) show a consistent interest in pairing the harmonica with unusual chamber-jazz partners rather than a conventional horn section, and his own production work for Barnum For Art extends that same small-ensemble, acoustic-jazz aesthetic to other Italian artists.