Pierluigi Balducci was born in Bari on October 3, 1971, and has worked from that Puglia base as an electric and acoustic bassist since the mid-1990s. He started out on classical guitar before turning to bass, a background that shows in the harmonic, composer-first approach of his own records. Discogs catalogs 38 release credits under his name across leader, sideman, and guest appearances, dating back to a session on the singer Tavernanova's Matengue (1996).

His first studio work as a leader came under a group billing, Pierluigi Balducci Quartethno, with Niebla (2000, Splasc(h)), featuring the Swedish-Italian guitarist Lutte Berg and a soprano saxophone credit from Roberto Ottaviano. His debut album under his own name, Il Peso Delle Nuvole (2003, Splasc(h)), brought in the Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger, Ottaviano again, and pianist Mirko Signorile. He followed it with two more group-billed leader sessions, Leggero - Live In Bari (2006) as the Pierluigi Balducci Small Ensemble and Rouge! (2010) as the Pierluigi Balducci Ensemble, both on the Puglia label Dodicilune, which became his main recording home from the mid-2000s on.

Two long-running quartet and trio projects followed. Stupor Mundi (2008, Dodicilune) paired him with accordionist Luciano Biondini, guitarist Antonio Tosques, drummer Giuseppe Berlen, and the string section Quartetto Dark. Then came a transatlantic quartet built around the American reedman Paul McCandless and the British pianist John Taylor, with drummer Michele Rabbia (also already profiled on this site): Blue From Heaven (2012, Dodicilune) and, five years later, Evansiana (2017, Dodicilune), an album-length tribute to the compositions of Bill Evans, recorded in October 2014. Taylor died in 2015; Balducci dedicated his next leader date, L'Equilibrista (2020, Dodicilune, with tenor saxophonist Robert Bonisolo, guitarist Fabrizio Savino, and drummer Dario Congedo), to his memory.

Balducci's other defining project is a Puglia-based trio with clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi and guitarist Nando Di Modugno, billed under all three names. The group released Amori Sospesi (2015, Dodicilune), reviewed in the UK by Jazzwise; Tabacco e Caffe (recorded 2019, released 2021, Dodicilune), taped at Artesuono Recording Studios; and Girasoli (2022, Fone), cut for the audiophile label's Super Audio CD series around its 2021 Music Festival Piaggio edition. Elsewhere, he has a shorter duo/trio credit alongside guitarist Maurizio Brunod and vocalist Marta Raviglia on Cherry Dance (2010), and a co-billed session with bassist-composer Viz Maurogiovanni, Cinema - Vol. 1 (2016). His most recent leader release is Kosmos & Chaos (2026, Encore Music), a co-billed album with the vocalist Badrya Razem; Mirabassi again appears on the record, per the label's own credits, though Discogs has not yet published a full personnel breakdown for it.

As a sideman, Balducci is a recurring name on Puglia and wider Italian jazz sessions: guitarist Alex Milella's Light Shades (2004), singer Luisiana Lorusso's Upwards (2006), the Antonio Tosques Quartet's Synopsis (2007), pianist Gabriele Rampino's Galantuomini (2008), pianist Onofrio Paciulli's Musicopoli (2010), singer Silvia Anglani's Complice (2012), Serena Spedicato's My Waits (Tom Waits Songbook) (2012), and pianist Marco Contardi's My Perpetual Life (2012), among others. He also appears twice, in 1999, on nu-jazz producer Nicola Conte's early records Bossa Per Due and Jet Sounds, playing electric bass on a scene that, unlike his own catalog, leans toward Conte's broken-beat and future-jazz idiom rather than straight-ahead jazz.

Outside the jazz catalog, Balducci composed the score, with Aldo De Palma, for Catherine Breillat's film Fat Girl (A ma soeur!, 2001), which screened at the Berlin International Film Festival that year; this is a film-scoring credit documented on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and IMDb rather than a Discogs jazz recording, and is noted here as a separate strand of his work. He teaches electric bass and jazz improvisation at the Conservatorio di Matera's jazz department and has published instructional books on contemporary electric bass technique, and endorses Meridian Guitars, GR Bass Amplifiers, and Sansone Strings.

Balducci's own description of his music, repeated across his official biography, is a balance of "African-American jazz language" with "European classical and folk tradition," composition weighed evenly against improvisation. That balance plays out differently across his catalog's two main modes. The transatlantic quartet records with McCandless, Taylor, and Rabbia sit in a spacious, chamber-jazz register built for oboe, piano, and electric bass without a fixed low end competing for space, closer to the ECM tradition Taylor came from than to a conventional rhythm-section date. The Mirabassi/Di Modugno trio work runs in a related but more overtly Mediterranean-to-Latin-American direction, an acoustic, drummerless format that leans on Brazilian and Latin American repertoire alongside originals. His electric-bass leader dates under his own name and group billings (Niebla, Il Peso Delle Nuvole, Stupor Mundi, L'Equilibrista) tend toward a fuller, fusion-inflected band sound with guitar, drums, and reeds or strings.