Riccardo Pittau was born in 1973 in Guasila, a small town in central Sardinia, into a family of musicians, and began learning trumpet at age nine. He still lives in Guasila, in a building that was once his grandfather's bakery. He teaches jazz trumpet at the Cagliari Conservatory, alongside a performing career that runs from free jazz and free improvisation to Balkan brass music and the folk traditions of his own island.

His main outlet as a leader is Congregation, the quartet/trio through which he released V IV MMV Death Jazz (2007, Improvvisatore Involontario), confirmed at the Discogs credit level as Jazz, tagged Avant-garde Jazz and Free Improvisation. The album's personnel is itself a document of his working circle: alto saxophonist Gianni Gebbia, drummer Francesco Cusa, guitarist Paolo Angeli on prepared Sardinian guitar, and Vincenzo Vasi on electric bass, theremin and vocals, with Pittau himself on trumpet. Congregation also released Izlazak Sunca, and Pittau recorded Per Gramsci as a trio with poet Alberto Masala and Paolo Angeli; both are available on his Bandcamp page but are not indexed on Discogs. Separately, he fronts HardWin, a rock band whose one Discogs-documented release, You're Gonna Hit The Ground (2018), sits outside jazz entirely and credits him on trumpet, flugelhorn, Hammond and Vox Continental organ, synthesizer and Solina string keyboard.

Beyond his own bands, Pittau's Discogs artist page (ID 1884989) logs roughly two dozen appearance and guest credits since the mid-1990s, almost all tagged Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz, Free Jazz or Free Improvisation. He plays trumpet on Francesco Cusa's own 1997 record Du Demon Et D'autres Questions, on Cusa's conducted large ensemble Naked Musicians (A Sicilian Way Of Cooking Mind, 2005) and electric octet Skrunch (L'arte Della Guerra, 2007), and on Francesco Nurra's Diario Di Un Pazzo (2014, Cusa conducting). He plays trombone as well as trumpet on the Specchio Ensemble's Porcyville (2003), a group led by guitarist-composer Domenico Caliri with Cusa on drums. On Enzo Favata Tentetto's The New Village (2007, Il Manifesto), a ten-piece band pairing jazz musicians with the Sardinian vocal quartet Tenores Di Bitti, Pittau's trumpet sits alongside Enzo Favata on tenor saxophone and Daniele Di Bonaventura on piano. He also appears on two large Italian free-jazz ensemble recordings: Seize The Time! (2002, Splasc(h)), a two-disc set by the Nexus Orchestra reworking Roswell Rudd's and Carla Bley's Jazz Composer's Orchestra book, where his trumpet sits in a horn section alongside trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini and bassists Giovanni Maier, Paolino Dalla Porta and Piero Leveratto; and Live In Rome (2005, C-Jam Joint) by the Blast Unit Orchestra, on which he plays trombone alongside saxophonist Achille Succi, trumpeter Giovanni Falzone and drummer Cristiano Calcagnile.

One credit stands out for its company: Possible Universe (Conduction 192) (recorded live in 2010 at the Sant'Anna Arresi Jazz Festival in Sardinia, released 2014 on Nu Bop Records), a large-ensemble "conduction" led by the American cornetist and conductor Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris, on which Pittau's trumpet is Discogs-credited in an ensemble that also includes David Murray on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet and the British saxophonist Evan Parker. It is a shared large-ensemble credit rather than a one-on-one collaboration, but it independently corroborates part of Pittau's own official biography, which names Steve Lacy, David Murray, Evan Parker, Hamid Drake and Misha Mengelberg among the musicians he has performed with; beyond the Morris conduction, no individual Discogs release credit connects Pittau to Lacy, Drake or Mengelberg, so those remain biography-sourced claims rather than verified cross-links. His official biography also lists him as a guest soloist with the Balkan brass ensemble Boban and Marko Markovic Orkestar, and describes a Sardinian-language adaptation of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat that he built around the island's launeddas triple-pipe tradition and electronics.

Pittau describes his own playing as a fusion of the jazz trumpet tradition with Balkan brass phrasing and the melodic language of Sardinian folk music, a combination borne out by his catalog: Discogs tags his leader album Jazz, styled Avant-garde Jazz and Free Improvisation, while his guest work runs through the same Italian free-jazz and free-improvisation circles built around labels like Improvvisatore Involontario and musicians such as Francesco Cusa and Gianni Gebbia. That improvising identity sits alongside a folkloric one: years spent studying the island's launeddas tradition, guest appearances with a Balkan brass orchestra, and a Stravinsky adaptation rebuilt around Sardinian instruments and language. In an interview with the Italian magazine The New Noise, he was blunt about preferring originality to imitation, saying he would rather hear music that is "ugly but at least original" than another record that repeats the tradition politely; he also teaches jazz trumpet at the Cagliari Conservatory, an institutional credential that sits alongside his performing catalog.