Riccardo Zegna is an Italian jazz pianist, composer and arranger born in Turin on July 7, 1946, into a musical family: his father Ilario Zegna led a big band, and as a child Riccardo toured northern Italy with it playing congas and drums. He began drums at age five and classical piano at thirteen, graduating with honors from the Niccolo Paganini Conservatory in Genoa in 1970. He worked first in piano recitals before dedicating himself to jazz in the second half of the 1970s, playing jam sessions at Turin's Swing Club and Milan's Capolinea.

His first documented jazz recording is singer Tiziana Ghiglioni's debut album, Lonely Woman (Dischi Della Quercia, 1981), on which Zegna plays piano alongside tenor saxophonist Larry Nocella, bassist Piero Leveratto and drummer Luigi Bonafede; the record was reviewed favorably by the critic Arrigo Polillo. Through the 1980s Zegna worked with visiting American musicians including Buddy Tate, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Bob Berg, Lee Konitz and George Coleman, and he reunited with Ghiglioni as a sideman on her sextet album Streams (Splasc(h) Records, 1989). In 1993 he recorded Alliance (Penta Flowers/Gemini Music Library) with saxophonist Pietro Tonolo, trombonist Roberto Rossi, Leveratto on bass and the American drummer and vibraphonist Joe Chambers, who also wrote the album's liner notes.

Zegna's debut as a leader, the solo piano album Andalusa (Splasc(h) Records), was recorded at S.A.M. Studios in Lari, near Pisa, in 1997, with liner notes by Tonolo. In 1999 he led a piano trio with bassist Furio Di Castri and Bonafede on drums for the live album Green Dolphin Street - Live in Siena (Splasc(h) Records), which he also produced. That same year he began a long-running chamber-jazz project with clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi, setting his own compositions and arrangements for mixed ensembles of reed, string and wind players rather than a standard rhythm section. The project produced Piccolo Valzer (EGEA, 2001), with Mirabassi and Tonolo as the featured soloists alongside cello, flute, violin, trombone and bass clarinet; Barcarola (EGEA, 2002), a quartet with Tonolo, the American accordionist Gil Goldstein and cellist Enrico Di Crosta; Carillon (EGEA, 2006), again with Mirabassi, plus flute, violin, cello, double bass and the singer Joanna Rimmer; and In a Sentimental Jazz (Giotto Music/EGEA Music, 2022), a two-disc set that reassembled much of the same chamber lineup with Mirabassi, Tonolo, Di Crosta and others. In 2007 he was one of six pianists, alongside Paolo Birro, Oscar Del Barba, Massimo Parente, Marcello Tonolo and Antonio Zambrini, on the various-pianists compilation Mystere Piano (Velut Luna).

Monk-a-ning (Incipit Records, 2010) is a solo piano tribute to Thelonious Monk. Five and Six (Incipit Records, 2015) is a quartet record with bassist Gabriele Evangelista, the American drummer Billy Hart and cellist Marco Allocco. Intra (self-released, 2016) is a vocal record made with singer Cristina Meschia. Zegna also recorded two duo albums with trumpeter Giampaolo Casati, both tributes to earlier jazz repertoire: Royal Garden Blues (Splasc(h) Records, 2002), built around Louis Armstrong, and Paris Blues (Fone Jazz, 2015), recorded in the cellar of the Palazzo di Scoto di Semifonte in Certaldo Alto and drawing on Duke Ellington. The two also appear together, in separate credits rather than as a duo, on Tonolo's Disguise (Splasc(h) Records, 1997), where Casati plays cornet and trumpet, Zegna piano, and Gianluigi Trovesi alto saxophone, piccolo flute and bass clarinet.

As a sideman, Zegna is the pianist on alto saxophonist Massimo Urbani's Go Max Go (Philology, 2001), with drummer Gianni Cazzola, and on the 2023 tribute album 30 (Red Record) by the Massimo Urbani Quintet, again with Cazzola and Tonolo. He plays piano and is credited as a featured soloist on two Gianni Basso Big Band albums, Summertime (Azzurra Music, 2001) and Groovin High (VideoRadio). Earlier sideman credits include guitarist Sandro Gibellini's Felix (Tirreno, 1990), with Leveratto on bass and Mauro Negri on tenor saxophone, and Tonolo's Simbiosi (Splasc(h) Records, 1995), on which Zegna is one of four pianists featured across the record alongside Birro, Rita Marcotulli and Danilo Rea. On Tonolo's Oltremare (EGEA, 2004) he plays alongside Leveratto and the American drummer Paul Motian. Further credits include harpist Marcella Carboni's Trame (2010), singer Danila Satragno's Un Lupo in Darsena (2012), a track on Joanna Rimmer's own album Dedicated To...Just Me (2009), a track on the Carlo Aonzo Trio's mandolin record Mandolitaly (2019), and appearances on compilations including a Henry Mancini tribute (2016) and Tullio De Piscopo's fiftieth-anniversary box set (2015).

Before settling into jazz, Zegna also played keyboards on the Italian progressive-rock album Corte dei Miracoli (1976) and piano on two jazz-rock-leaning releases by the group Gialma 3, L'Isola del Tonal (1979) and Gialma Planet (1982); all three predate or overlap his move into dedicated jazz work and are a small fraction of his output next to his jazz discography.

Zegna built a long parallel teaching career, holding a jazz piano position at the Turin Civic School, giving jazz piano seminars at Siena Jazz from 1983 to 2008, and teaching jazz piano at the Ghedini Conservatory in Cuneo from 2003 to 2013, alongside a 1972-to-2003 post teaching art in Savona's high schools. He performed at the Grand Parade du Jazz in Nice in 1983 and 1985, and at Umbria Jazz across much of the period from 1983 to 2005, and he toured in Russia, the United States and Austria, including a 2002 broadcast for Austrian radio ORF in Vienna. His biographies also name the trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and the saxophonist Dave Liebman among the musicians he has performed with; those are biographical claims without a specific recording behind them, so they are listed here without being treated as documented collaborations.

Zegna's own records move between two distinct modes: a standards- and tribute-based mainstream and post-bop pianism (the Armstrong-themed Royal Garden Blues, the Ellington-themed Paris Blues, the Monk tribute Monk-a-ning, the trio record Green Dolphin Street) and a chamber-jazz voice built around his own compositions for mixed acoustic ensembles of reed, string and wind instruments rather than a conventional rhythm section, heard across Piccolo Valzer, Barcarola, Carillon and In a Sentimental Jazz. That second strand, developed over more than two decades with clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi and saxophonist Pietro Tonolo as his most consistent partners, blends jazz improvisation with instrumentation and written arrangement closer to chamber music. His earliest professional work, as a sideman to touring American musicians in the late 1970s and 1980s, sits in a straighter mainstream-jazz tradition, and a handful of early credits on progressive-rock and jazz-rock records from the late 1970s and early 1980s reflect work from before and around his move into dedicated jazz.