Nicola Fazzini is an alto and soprano saxophonist and composer, born in Milan on August 19, 1970 and based in Venice for most of his adult career - by his own description, "born in Milan but adopted Venetian by choice." He began studying saxophone at 16 with Giuseppe Scala and took part in seminars at Siena Jazz before moving to Austria in 1992, where he spent five years in the jazz department of the Musikhochschule Graz, earning a three-year diploma in jazz saxophone in 1997. He later completed a second, Italian jazz diploma, with the top mark of 110/110, at the Conservatorio "A. Steffani" in Castelfranco Veneto in 2008. His identity is confirmed via Discogs artist 1861682, a single unambiguous entity with no namesake collision, whose eleven listed group affiliations match his documented biography in full.

Fazzini's own working group, the Nicola Fazzini Quartet, made its first record, Watch Your Step, for the Venetian label Caligola in 2008, with Stefano Senni on double bass, Tommaso Cappellato on drums and Riccardo Chiarion on guitar. A second quartet album, Metamorfosi (2013, with drummer Luca Colussi in Cappellato's place), built its writing on a scale system derived from composer Nikolai Slonimsky's theories. He has also recorded two records entirely alone: The Empty Bottle Market (2010), a co-composed quartet date with pianist Nicola Bottos, bassist Simone Serafini and drummer Klemens Marktl, and Random² (2015), a 46-track unaccompanied alto saxophone album subtitled "Minimum Sax Vol. 1."

His most enduring project is the XYQuartet, co-founded in 2011 with electric bassist Alessandro Fedrigo and rounded out by vibraphonist Saverio Tasca and drummer Luca Colussi. Across six albums for the Venice-based cooperative label nusica.org - Idea F (2013), XY (2014), Orbite (2017), QuartettoQuartetto (2020, with the Ensemble Di Percussioni Pedrollo), StraborDante (2021, with vocalist John De Leo) and Lexycon (2025) - the group built a reputation distinctive enough that Musica Jazz magazine named it the second-best Italian jazz formation in both 2014 and 2017. Orbite was deliberately released on April 12, the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's 1961 orbital flight, its eight compositions dedicated to early space explorers.

Alongside performing, Fazzini has built a long career as an educator and arts administrator in the Venice area. He directed the Thelonious Monk School of Music in Mira, near Venice, from 2007 to 2014; co-founded and has co-directed the nusica.org cultural association and label since 2011; served as artistic director of the Jazz a Mira festival from 2010 to 2016 and of the Jazz Area Metropolitana network since 2017; and sits on the board of I-Jazz, the Italian association of jazz festivals. Since 2016 he has also taught improvisation and composition workshops at Ca' Foscari University in Venice. He currently teaches Jazz Composition at the Conservatorio "Tartini" in Trieste, where a faculty colleague, double bassist Giovanni Maier, became his duo partner: the two had known each other musically for over twenty years before beginning to explore the duo format in 2025, releasing Twogetherness (recorded in a single July 2025 session at Maier's Palomar Studio) and a second duo album, Herbarium Sonorum (recorded April 2026, released that September on nusica.org, not yet Discogs-indexed).

His own biography also credits performances alongside Enrico Rava, Peter Erskine, Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, Mark Murphy, Evan Parker, Miles Okazaki, Amir ElSaffar, François Houle, Nick Frazer and Samuel Blaser - collaborations documented in his own artist materials and press coverage rather than independently confirmed at the Discogs credit level in every case.

Fazzini's output spans a genuine stylistic range within the jazz tradition: the Nicola Fazzini Quartet records sit in a contemporary, structurally ambitious post-bop idiom (Metamorfosi's Slonimsky-derived scale system is characteristic of this side of his writing), while the XYQuartet - built around the unusual combination of alto saxophone, electric bass, vibraphone and drums - pushes toward a more exploratory, chamber-like sound that has drawn critical recognition as one of the more distinctive working bands in Italian jazz. His duo work with Giovanni Maier and his unaccompanied Random² project sit further still toward free improvisation, and his big-band sideman work - with Marcello Tonolo's Thelonious Monk Big Band and Wolfgang Schmidtke's orchestra - shows a parallel commitment to large-ensemble writing and section playing. Across all of it, composition (his own and others') remains as central to his identity as his saxophone playing; nearly every leader release in his catalog carries original material, and his teaching post is specifically in jazz composition rather than performance.