Nelide Bandello is a Verona-based drummer, percussionist and bandleader who has worked, in his own words, "in the world of jazz, independent rock, hardcore punk, pop, electro-funk and folk music," alongside a parallel career as a sideman that has taken him across Europe and put his name on more than fifty records in a variety of styles. OndaRock's profile of him describes a "creative Venetian drummer" who moved from hardcore-scene beginnings into jazz-oriented research through his own quintet, Leibniz. No birth date or birthplace for him is publicly documented on Discogs, Wikipedia, or any other source consulted for this profile.

His discography as a leader and co-leader, verified at the Discogs credit level, opens with No Leader (2007, Jazz Engine), a Leibniz quintet record with double bassist Giulio Corini, tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Francesco Bigoni and vibraphonist Pasquale Mirra, and continues through a run of trio and quartet dates alongside some of the more prominent names on Italy's creative-jazz circuit: Da Lontano Era Un'Isola (2010, El Gallo Rojo), a piano trio with Stefano Battaglia and Corini; Hymnus Ad Nocturnum (2014, Parco Della Musica Records), a quartet led by trumpeter Gabriele Mitelli with pianist Alfonso Santimone and Corini; and Live In Lugano (2024, The Flying Robert Music), a quartet led by saxophonist Andrea Ayassot with Santimone and Corini, favorably reviewed by All About Jazz. Alongside these dates he leads his own groups: the quintet Leibniz, the improvising chamber ensemble Einfalt (cm 12x12, 2008, and When The Teacher, both El Gallo Rojo), the Copenhagen-based trio Høbama with pianist Emanuele Maniscalco and organist Claus Højensgård, the self-recorded De Ludo (2018), and the power trio Bar Tritolo, whose two albums (Bar Tritolo, 2014, and Milagro, 2022) Discogs tags Jazz and Rock, under the style Avant-garde Jazz.

His wider sideman work runs deeper into straight creative-jazz territory: saxophonist Helga Plankensteiner's Plankton (2013 and 2018, on the German label Jazzwerkstatt), the Giordano Grossi Quartet, the Betty Vittori 5et, Federico Squassabia Walkabout, Giacomo Papetti's The Loom, the Nicola Lancerotti Quartet/Skin, and Corini's own trio Libero Motu with Bigoni, on which he plays drums across all three of the group's records (Libero Motu, 2007; Off-Site Meetings, 2009; Future Revival, 2015, on Auand). He is also on Quilibrì's Tempi straordinari (2020, Auand, one of Italy's more respected contemporary-jazz imprints, per its own catalog) and on Maniscalco's 2011 quartet album From Time To Time, a set of Paul Motian compositions with Bigoni and Corini. In 2021 he was booked with the Sonata Islands project on the Trentino Jazz club circuit, playing jazz arrangements of Alpine folk songs.

A real secondary strand of his career sits outside jazz entirely: session and recording work for the pop singer-songwriter Veronica Marchi, for Patrizia Laquidara e Hotel Rif (whose Il Canto Dell'Anguana won the Targa Tenco 2011 for best album in an Italian dialect), for the indie-rock band Il Generale Inverno, and for the rock act Rocky Wood, among others. He also runs his own record label, Flying Robert Music.

His own biography, as published on his Spotify artist page, additionally names pianist Stefano Battaglia, bassist Giovanni Maier, British pianist Kit Downes and the American bassist Jamaladeen Tacuma among his collaborators. The Battaglia connection is independently confirmed at the Discogs credit level (above); no Discogs credit, however, documents a Maier, Downes or Tacuma recording alongside Bandello, so those three names are noted here as a self-reported claim rather than a verified collaboration. Giovanni Maier has his own profile on this site.

Discogs' own genre data on Bandello's catalog leans decisively toward jazz. Of his eight Main-role (leader/co-leader) releases, six carry a Jazz tag, most of them further tagged Contemporary Jazz, Free Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz or Free Improvisation; among his roughly thirty additional sideman ("Appearance") credits, a clear majority are Jazz-tagged too, spanning free improvisation (Libero Motu, Einfalt, the From Time To Time quartet) through more song-based small-group work (Plankton, the Betty Vittori 5et). The exceptions are real and are named honestly rather than smoothed over: his own De Ludo is a self-recorded Pop/Folk World & Country record, and his session work for Veronica Marchi, Patrizia Laquidara, Il Generale Inverno and Rocky Wood sits outside jazz, in indie-rock, folk and pop terms.

The clearest single thread through his own leader catalog is a collision of jazz improvisation with rock and hardcore-punk energy. Italian jazz press reviewing his Bar Tritolo project has reached for exactly that vocabulary: OndaRock calls the group's sound "post-rock, third stream" and "jazzcore," and Jazz Convention's review of the Milagro follow-up describes an approach "rough and...imbued with a rock soul" that blends "rock, jazz, hard core, funky, punk, new wave." Discogs' own style tag for both Bar Tritolo albums, Avant-garde Jazz, points at the same thing: a drummer whose improvising vocabulary is jazz but who plays it with a punk and rock attack, distinct from the more song-based, straight-ahead creative jazz he plays as a sideman in groups led by Battaglia, Mitelli, Santimone and Corini.