Nicola Conte was born in Bari in 1962, on the Adriatic coast at the heel of Italy. He was given a classical piano training as a child and took up the guitar later, but he came to jazz late, in his final year of college, arriving from progressive rock by way of Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. The turn that shaped everything after was the discovery that Italy already had a jazz literature of its own, written for the cinema by Piero Umiliani and Piero Piccioni in the 1960s.

In the early 1990s he started a club night in Bari called Fez, after a photograph of Gillespie wearing one. It grew into a collective of musicians, DJs and organisers, and Conte has been open about where the idea came from: "The whole Fez thing was very much influenced by what was happening between jazz and clubs in the UK," naming Gilles Peterson and Colin Curtis as the models. His stated purpose was plainer still. "At the time, jazz had become really elitist but I wanted the music to get to everybody."

He worked first as a producer for other people. Introducing The Paolo Achenza Trio came out on Right Tempo in 1993, followed by Fez Combo's Follow The Spirit in 1995, Balanco's Bossa & Balanco on Schema in 1997 and The Jazz Convention's Up Up With The Jazz Convention in 1998. Then, on December 6, 7 and 8, 1999, he took a sextet into Studio Sorriso in Bari to record the book of Gianni Basso and Oscar Valdambrini, the tenor-and-trumpet partnership whose quintet, formed in 1955, had been picked up by Verve for its International Series in 1959. The band on that date was Fabrizio Bosso on trumpet and flugelhorn, Gianluca Petrella on trombone, Rosario Giuliani on alto saxophone, Pietro Lussu on piano, Giuseppe Bassi on double bass and Lorenzo Tucci on drums. Schema released it in 2000 as Look Out (Tribute To Basso / Valdambrini), credited to the Schema Sextet.

His own name went on a record the same year. The Jet Sounds EP appeared on Schema in 1999 and was expanded into an album recorded at Studio Sorriso between the spring of 1999 and the spring of 2000: bossa nova, 1960s Italian soundtrack writing, sitar and tabla, arranged around a club producer's sense of pace. On that record Conte is credited as writer, arranger and producer, not as a player. ESL Records issued it in the United States in 2001 under the title Bossa Per Due, and Thievery Corporation remixed the title track for a 10 inch that year.

The Brazilian side of the catalogue opened with Garota Moderna (Schema, 2002), Conte's production for the Rio-born singer Rosalia De Souza, followed by the companion remix album Garota Diferente in 2004. That same year Blue Note and Schema released Other Directions, the first album where Conte plays guitar on his own record. Recorded at Sorriso Studio between February 2003 and January 2004, it reunited Bosso, Petrella and Giuliani and added Daniele Scannapieco, Nicola Stilo, Pietro Ciancaglini, Pierpaolo Bisogno and the German trumpeter Till Bronner, with vocals from Bembe Segue, Cristina Zavalloni, Lisa Bassenge and Lucia Minetti. Conte described the change in his own working method: "The album was a major step because I really started composing properly; before that it was more about using samples."

Rituals followed on Schema in 2008, assembled from sessions at Sorriso Studios between autumn 2005 and winter 2007, with Greg Osby, Dusko Goykovich, Gaetano Partipilo, Timo Lassy, Teppo Makynen and guest vocals from Jose James, Till Bronner, Chiara Civello and Alice Ricciardi. Then came Love & Revolution (Impulse!, 2011), recorded in Bari across 2010 and 2011 with arrangements by the Swedish saxophonist Magnus Lindgren. Its vocal cast ran Jose James, Melanie Charles, Bridgette Amofah, Alice Ricciardi, Veronika Harcsa, Nailah Porter, Ghalia Benali and Gregory Porter, whose own debut Water was a year old and already nominated for the Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy; he would win that award in 2014 for Liquid Spirit. Schema returned to the record thirteen years later, issuing the two Porter tracks as a 45rpm 7 inch in September 2024 ahead of the album's first vinyl pressing that November.

From 2017 the work turned toward Afro-spiritual jazz, largely in partnership with Gianluca Petrella, his fellow Bari native. The pair issued a run of Schema 12 inches beginning with African Spirits / New World Shuffle in 2017 and gathered them on People Need People in 2021. In between, Let Your Light Shine On (MPS, May 18, 2018) introduced Spiritual Galaxy, Conte's working touring band, recorded live in Bari and Johannesburg with Petrella, Theo Croker, Logan Richardson, Lindgren, and vocals from Zara McFarlane, Bridgette Amofah and Carolina Bubbico. Umoja (Far Out Recordings, June 30, 2023) extended it further, cut at 45rpm across a double LP with McFarlane, Amofah and Myles Sanko singing, Timo Lassy on tenor, Pietro Lussu on Rhodes and Wurlitzer, Teppo Makynen on drums, Alberto Parmegiani on guitar, Abdissa Assefa on congas, Simon Moullier on vibraphone and the Serbian flutist Milena Jancuric, herself based in Bari, soloing on "Heritage."

Running alongside the recordings is a second career as an archivist. Far Out Recordings commissioned five volumes of Viagem between 2008 and 2013 to excavate 1960s Brazilian bossa nova and samba jazz. Universal gave him Spiritual Swingers in 2009, Prestige Mystic Prestige in 2014, Blue Note Blue Note Tribe in 2015 and MPS Cosmic Forest in 2018. In November 2025 Far Out released Nicola Conte Presents Viaggio, an Italian counterpart to the Brazilian series.

He remains prolific. The Tema Due project with Nico Lahs produced EP1 in May 2025 and EP2 in September 2025 before the double album Universo Astratto arrived on Schema on May 8, 2026, with guest vocals from Lalin St. Juste, Nina Miranda, Siya Makuzeni and Toco. Two further 2026 releases close the circle back to where he began: a Far Out Record Store Day 7 inch, Terra Em Transe / Naquela Base, and Reloved (The Afro Club Mixes) on Four Flies Records, four reworkings of early-1970s Italian library recordings including Piero Umiliani's "Nel Villaggio."

Conte's music sits at the point where three traditions meet: American modal and hard bop jazz, Brazilian bossa nova and samba jazz, and the jazz written for Italian cinema in the 1960s by Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni and their contemporaries. The British club-jazz movement of the early 1990s supplied the delivery mechanism. What he took from Gilles Peterson and Colin Curtis was not a sound but a premise: that jazz can be programmed for a dancefloor without being simplified for one.

The catalogue moves through three clear phases. The first, running from Jet Sounds in 2000 through Jet Sounds Revisited in 2002, is sample-based and cinematic, closer to production than to composition, and Conte does not play on it. The second opens with Other Directions in 2004, where he picks up the guitar and writes for a live acoustic band drawn from the Italian post-bop scene. The third begins around 2017 with the Petrella 12 inches and runs through Let Your Light Shine On and Umoja: Afro-spiritual jazz built on modal vamps, four-to-the-floor pulses and an international cast of vocalists, with the dancefloor still audibly in the room.

The constant across all three is casting. Conte's most characteristic act as a musician is deciding which players should be holding a given piece of material, whether that material is a Basso Valdambrini head, a forgotten Brazilian single or one of his own compositions. Discogs credits him across 738 unique releases; 59 carry his name as the main artist and 276 are remixes of other people's records, a ratio that describes the working method as accurately as any description of the sound.