Piero Odorici was born in Bologna on July 28, 1962, and started on saxophone at age ten, working through classical saxophone and clarinet training before turning to jazz around fifteen after hearing a Dexter Gordon and Johnny Griffin recording. Bologna club owner Alberto Alberti (later the executive producer of Odorici's 1991 debut, First Play) introduced him to touring American musicians passing through the city, and in 1982 he began an informal apprenticeship under two visiting tenor saxophonists, Sal Nistico and Steve Grossman, both of whom he counts as his principal mentors. He made his festival debut at Umbria Jazz in 1984, at 22, and played there annually for the following decade.

Odorici's leader discography, confirmed at the Discogs release level, opens with First Play (1991, Red Record, recorded as the Piero Odorici Quartet with Marc Abrams on bass, Marcello Tonolo on piano and Salvatore Tranchini on drums) and continues through Plays Kurt Weill (1993, Jazzaround, billed to the Piero Odorici Quintet featuring trumpeter Eddie Henderson, with Marcello Tonolo, Piero Leveratto on bass and Luigi Bonafede on drums), Panarea (1997, Jazz Today, featuring drummer Steve Ellington, bassist Marc Abrams and pianist Paolo Birro) and Estate (2002, Red Record, recorded live at the Trenzano Jazz Festival with guitarist Sandro Gibellini, pianist Marcello Tonolo, bassist Marco Micheli and drummer Fabio Grandi).

His American recording debut came in 2012 with Piero Odorici With The Cedar Walton Trio, released on Savant as Cedar Walton Presents Piero Odorici. Pianist Cedar Walton, who both played on and produced the session, had taken Odorici on as a protege in the years before the record was made; the working trio behind him, bassist David Williams and drummer Willie Jones III, was Walton's own working rhythm section. Odorici returned to a tribute format in 2021 with Dedicated to Steve Grossman (Alessa Records), honoring his other mentor, with pianist Andrea Pozza, bassist Aldo Zunino, drummer Bernd Reiter and trumpeter Stéphane Belmondo as a featured guest; the project was also carried to the stage as the Piero Odorici/Bernd Reiter Quartet, including a 2021 date at Vienna's Porgy & Bess billed as a Steve Grossman memorial concert.

Odorici is also Discogs-verified as a guest with pianist George Cables' working quartet on Live In Bollate (2006, Musica Jazz, with bassist Essiet Essiet and drummer Victor Lewis), and as a sideman on organist Brother Jack McDuff's Jack-Pot (1996), alongside pianist Massimo Farao and baritone saxophonist Bruno Marini. Earlier in his career he was a member of the Bologna-based Guido Manusardi Sextet, appearing on Acqua Fragia (1989, Splasc(h) Records) with bassist Paolino Dalla Porta, trombonist Roberto Rossi and trumpeter Marco Tamburini, and he held a saxophone chair in the Bologna big band Keptorchestra, documented on two guest-led dates: Sweet Sixteen (1994, with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy) and Miss Etna (1996, with tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano), both large-ensemble recordings crowded with other Italian horn players including Mauro Negri, Marcello Tonolo and Marco Tamburini.

Alongside his jazz work, Odorici has recorded as a session saxophonist for a run of major Italian pop and popular-song artists, Discogs-verified credits including Lucio Dalla, Gianni Morandi, Luciano Pavarotti, Biagio Antonacci, Jovanotti, Ornella Vanoni, Tiziano Ferro and singer-songwriter Vinicio Capossela; this side work runs parallel to, rather than displaces, his standing as a working jazz saxophonist. Press interviews and biographies, including a DownBeat profile and his own Jazzitalia biography, additionally credit stage and studio time with Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Jackie McLean, Billy Higgins, Slide Hampton, Lee Konitz, George Coleman, Billy Hart, Steve Gadd, Eric Reed, Dezron Douglas, Darryl Hall, Curtis Fuller and Harold Mabern; these could not be matched to a specific Discogs release and are flagged as press-sourced rather than discography-verified (see notes.md). He has toured across France, Germany, Greece, Finland and Canada, and performed in the United States in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, appearing at festivals including Umbria Jazz, Orvieto Jazz Winter, the Nice Jazz Festival and Pori Jazz Festival.

Odorici plays in a swinging, hard-bop-and-post-bop mainstream idiom directly descended from his two acknowledged mentors, Sal Nistico and Steve Grossman, both tenor saxophonists themselves shaped by the John Coltrane lineage. He has described his own approach as old-school rather than experimental, oriented toward the American small-group jazz tradition rather than the freer or more avant-garde currents also present elsewhere in his discography (his 1997 date Panarea carries a Discogs "Free Jazz" style tag, an outlier against the "Post Bop" and "Contemporary Jazz" tags on his other leader releases). That mainstream orientation is reflected in his working partnerships: two records built directly around American rhythm sections associated with hard bop's classic generation, Cedar Walton's own trio in 2012 and, in 2021, a tribute session dedicated to Grossman himself.