Raffaele Casarano was born on May 7, 1981, in Sogliano Cavour, a small town in the province of Lecce at the southern tip of Puglia's Salento peninsula. He began studying saxophone at seven, trained with Fabio Sammarco at the "N. Piccinni" Conservatory in Bari, and in July 2004 earned his diploma from the "Tito Schipa" Conservatory in Lecce, where he studied under Luigi Fazi before moving into jazz studies with Roberto Ottaviano. That same conservatory's own orchestra later backed him on his 2006 leader debut.

He founded his group Locomotive in 2004 and released Legend (Dodicilune, 2006) as Raffaele Casarano & Locomotive, featuring trumpeter Paolo Fresu alongside the Orchestra del Conservatorio "Tito Schipa." Replay (EmArcy, 2009) followed with the same Fresu billing, and Argento (2010) - reviewed by All About Jazz at the Porsche Padua Jazz Festival - brought in bassist Marco Bardoscia and bandoneon player Daniele Di Bonaventura as a special guest, plus an unusual liner-notes credit to novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Bardoscia became Casarano's most consistent musical partner, recurring across Noe (2013), Medina (2015), Rock 4.0 (2014, as a sideman on trumpeter Luca Aquino's album) and the trio album discussed below - seven Discogs-verified sessions together in all.

In 2012 Casarano co-founded Puglia Jazz Factory with fellow Bari-scene saxophonist Gaetano Partipilo and pianist Mirko Signorile, releasing From The Heel (2012) and African Way (2015), both Discogs-confirmed as three-way co-leader dates alongside bassist Marco Bardoscia and drummer Fabio Accardi. Signorile became a recurring collaborator in his own right, appearing on Medina (2015) and the ensemble session Around Tuk (2016, on Fresu's Tuk Music label, also featuring Partipilo, Gianluca Petrella, Dino Rubino, Bebo Ferra, Francesco Ponticelli and Enrico Morello) before the two recorded D'Amour (2019) as a duo of treated saxophone and electric piano, and again on Ani' (2022).

Casarano is also the founder and artistic director of the Locomotive Jazz Festival, launched in his hometown of Sogliano Cavour in 2006 and grown, by its fifteenth edition in 2020, into a program spanning the wider Salento and Puglia region. Oltremare (2018), his fourth Tuk Music album, paired him with an international rhythm section of bassist-cellist Lars Danielsson, pianist Eric Legnini and drummer Manu Katche, with vocalist Danno guesting on the title track; Casarano subsequently toured internationally as a member of Katche's own band on the 2015-2018 "Unstatic" tour, though he is not among the credited musicians on Katche's own studio album of that name. Ani' (2022) pushed further into fusion, featuring Tunisian oud player and vocalist Dhafer Youssef and rapper M1 of Dead Prez alongside Signorile. His catalog also includes two smaller-scale duo projects outside his core quartet work: Todomercedes (2020, with classical guitarist Claudio Farinone) and Libera (2025, Discogs-tagged Pop rather than Jazz, a collaboration with singer-songwriter Bungaro).

A separate strand of his discography is session and compilation work: sideman credits on records led by Dario Congedo (Nadan, 2009), Alberto Parmegiani (as a fellow guest on Replay), and appearances on Puglia-region and Tuk Music label compilations through the 2010s. In 2016, the trio billed Savoldelli/Casarano/Bardoscia released The Great Jazz Gig In The Sky on MoonJune Records, a full vocal-and-acoustic-trio reworking of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon with guest guitar from Indonesian musician Dewa Budjana; All About Jazz's Roger Farbey reviewed it on release, and its title track was later anthologized on two MoonJune-affiliated compilations.

Casarano's own catalog moves between a Discogs-tagged core of Contemporary and Cool Jazz (Legend, Replay, Argento, Noe) and more overt fusion, with Oltremare and D'Amour both carrying an additional Electronic genre tag and The Great Jazz Gig In The Sky tagged across Jazz, Rock and Electronic alike. That range reflects a working method built on treated and processed saxophone, credited on release after release as "electronics" or "live electronics" alongside the horn itself, and on recurring collaborators who share his interest in blending traditions - Bardoscia and Signorile in a Puglia-rooted, Mediterranean-inflected setting, Danielsson, Legnini and Katche in a more international post-bop-to-fusion vein, and Youssef and M1 in an outright jazz/world/hip-hop crossover on Ani'. Puglia Jazz Factory, his longest-running group project with Partipilo and Signorile, sits at the funk-and-Mediterranean end of that same spectrum.