Riccardo Randisi is a Palermo jazz pianist who has spent more than four decades on the city's bandstands, first as a teenage sideman in his father's group and later as the long-serving pianist of the Sicilian Jazz Orchestra. He was born in Palermo in 1963 and began at the piano as a child under the guidance of his father, Enzo Randisi, the vibraphonist and clarinetist who was one of the central figures of Sicilian jazz. He went on to study at the Palermo conservatory under Gaetano Cellizza, graduating with top marks, and later refined his classical technique with the concert pianists Giuseppe La Licata and Vera Gornostaeva.

He debuted professionally at fourteen, in 1978, at the Messina Jazz Meeting, drawing favorable notice from critics there and a further special mention in 1982. Discogs documents his earliest recordings as a teenager in his father's band: on Enzo Randisi (P.D.R., 1979), a four-track modal jazz-funk LP, he plays Rhodes electric piano and ARP synthesizer, and he composed the track "Etna Sud." He returned on piano, Rhodes, ARP and Korg keyboards for the Enzo Randisi Swing Ensemble LP (Ransemble, recorded at Palermo's ZIZ Studio in March 1981), the same year he toured Spain with the Swing Ensemble. A promo-only RAI library album, New Sound and Percussion (Nuovo Repertorio Editoriale, 1987), credits him as composer of the track "Immagini," alongside his father's four other compositions on the same record. In 1983 he also arranged a 7-inch pop single, "Adamo Ed Eva," for the Sicilian singer Franco Catalano, and in 2017 he played piano on two tracks, "La Tristessa" and "Sospesa," of the pop and folk record La Grande Tristessa by the group Bottega Retro, his only Discogs-documented appearance clearly outside jazz.

In 1984 he became the stable pianist of the Sicilian Jazz Orchestra (Orchestra Jazz Siciliana), the Brass Group's permanent big band, a post he has now held for over forty years under a succession of visiting conductors that his conservatory biography names as including Carla Bley, Gunther Schuller, Bob Brookmayer and Pete Rugolo. In 2009 he recorded with the orchestra alongside the American rhythm section of drummer Peter Erskine and percussionist Alex Acuna. He holds the chair of jazz piano at Palermo's "A. Scarlatti" Conservatory, where he also coordinates the department of jazz music and new technologies, and in 1999 he was named a Knight of Merit of the Italian Republic by President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro.

Randisi released his first album under his own name only in 2018, at age fifty-four: A Waltz for You (Abeat Records), a trio-and-quintet session recorded with bassist Giorgio Rosciglione, drummer Marcello Pellitteri, trumpeter Alessandro Presti, tenor saxophonist Francesco Patti and vocalist Kate Worker. The record pairs six of his own compositions with Cole Porter's "Love for Sale," Clifford Brown's "Joy Spring" and Sting's "King of Pain," and it is dedicated to his father, who had died in 2006. He presented it live at Palermo's Piano City festival and at a concert at the Real Teatro Santa Cecilia in January 2019. On April 11, 2024, he took part in a memorial tribute concert to his father at the same theater.

Reviewing A Waltz for You, the Italian magazine Musica Jazz described Randisi's playing as combining "Evansian language and post-bop perspectives" through "an engaging path marked by sophistication of expression, essential and inspired," with "a refined technique not shouted, only whispered." The review singled out his reharmonization of "Love for Sale" for its "instantaneous recomposition, great rhythmic and harmonic mobility," and called the record, after decades of low media visibility, the right occasion to hear "a musician... possessing outstanding technique." That description points to two distinct sides of his work on record: the acoustic, standards-and-original trio and quintet writing of his own 2018 debut, rooted in Bill Evans and post-bop harmony, and the electric Rhodes, ARP and Korg keyboard work he contributed as a teenager to his father's modal jazz-funk and swing-ensemble records at the end of the 1970s and start of the 1980s. Across both, his home base for over forty years has been the swing-to-modern big-band writing of the Sicilian Jazz Orchestra.