Roberto Ottaviano was born in Bari on December 21, 1957, and started young: self-taught on percussion and flute as a small child, then enrolled in clarinet classes at the Conservatory of Bari at age five. Drawn to Lester Young and John Coltrane, he moved to saxophone and later studied classical saxophone in Perugia under Federico Mondelci. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s he attended workshops with Evan Parker and Jimmy Giuffre, studied harmony and composition with Walter Boncompagni, and took courses with Giacomo Manzoni and Luigi Nono, a grounding in both the European free-improvisation scene and formal composition that shaped everything that followed. An accidental meeting with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy became the turning point: Ottaviano studied with Lacy, his acknowledged model and adviser, between 1980 and 1986, splitting the time between Paris and Italy, and has been counted among the leading voices of the soprano saxophone ever since.

He made his leader debut in 1983, recorded in 1985 and released as Aspects Solo & Sextet (Tactus), a sextet session already stacked with future names in Italian jazz: baritone saxophonist Carlo Actis Dato, trumpeter Paolo Fresu, trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini and drummer Marcello Magliocchi. The following years moved fast: a sideman date on Magliocchi's own debut Secret Life (1986, with Actis Dato again), the co-billed Cappelletti-Ottaviano Quartet's Samadhi (1986, with pianist Arrigo Cappelletti), and The Leap (1987, Red Record), a duo-centered date with American trombonist Ray Anderson. In 1989 he recorded the quartet album Sotto Il Sole Giaguaro with pianist Stefano Battaglia, bassist Piero Leveratto and drummer Ettore Fioravanti, followed by the solo-centered Otto (1991, Splasc(H), with liner notes by David Liebman) and the quartet date Behind the Window (1994, with pianist Nico Morelli and bassist Paolino Dalla Porta).

A defining partnership came in 1996 with American pianist Mal Waldron: Black Spirits Are Here Again (DIW), a duo recording that stands as one of the clearest statements of Ottaviano's affinity for the Lacy-Waldron lineage of spare, lyrical free jazz. The same decade saw him touring and recording with the Giorgio Gaslini ensembles that fed into the founding of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, documented on Gaslini's own large-ensemble session Masks (1992), and he has remained a member of the Instabile Orchestra's horn section into its 2020s reunions, including the 2025 release Plays Ellington and the orchestra's 2026 return to the stage at the Torino Jazz Festival. From 1989 he has held the jazz chair at the Conservatorio N. Piccinni in Bari, and he is the author of Il Sax: Lo Strumento, La Storia, I Protagonisti (Franco Muzzio Editore), a history of the saxophone and its players.

The 2000s and 2010s brought a run of steady, well-reviewed leader albums for the Puglia label Dodicilune: Pow Wow (2003, with trombonists Beppe Caruso and Gianluca Petrella), Arcthetics - Soffio Primitivo (2013) and Astrolabio (2015, featuring clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi and tuba/serpent player Michel Godard). In 2009 he co-founded Nel Gioco del Jazz, an I-Jazz association initiative that has staged some 300 concerts involving more than a thousand musicians. A long-running duo with Puglia guitarist Nando Di Modugno, billed Pinturas, produced four studio albums between 2008 and 2023 (Un Dio Clandestino, Change the World, a 2020 guest appearance together on Fortressa's Secret Change, and A Che Punto È La Notte). A parallel, decades-long duo and ensemble relationship with percussionist Andrea Centazzo runs from In A Rainy Day (2012) through The Gates (Live In Concert) (2021) and the 2024 Ictus Records anniversary concert Ictus@45 - Out Off Nights, on which both appear alongside Instabile Orchestra colleagues Carlo Actis Dato and Guido Mazzon.

His double-CD Forgotten Matches: The Worlds of Steve Lacy (1934-2004) (2014, Dodicilune) paid tribute to his mentor across a quartet volume (with trombonist Glenn Ferris) and a duo volume with British pianist Alexander Hawkins, and won multiple Italian jazz-press awards. The Hawkins partnership continued on Sideralis (2017) and Charlie's Blue Skylight (2022), a duo exploration of Charles Mingus's music that placed third in Musica Jazz's Top Jazz 2022 album-of-the-year poll; that same year, the magazine's annual critics' referendum named Ottaviano Italian Musician of the Year, the jury citing "great tenacity and farsightedness in his fervent research activity." His quintet Eternal Love, running since 2018 and centered on Africa and its musical culture, released Eternal Love (2018) and People (2024). A duo with French tuba and serpent player Michel Godard produced Astrolabio Mistico (2023), and a trio with bassist Danilo Gallo and drummer Ferdinando Faraò recorded the Steve Lacy tribute Lacy In The Sky With Diamonds (2024, Clean Feed); Gallo's regular trio Gulliver, with Massimo Barbiero and Maurizio Brunod, also hosted Ottaviano as a guest on The Billia Session (2025). His most recent leader album, Dark Sides (2025, Dodicilune), folds electronics and oud into his working quartet, and in 2026 he recorded the duo album Synàntisi with British bassist Barry Guy, its liner notes written in part by Evan Parker.

Press profiles also describe Ottaviano as having shared stages or sessions over his career with figures including trumpeter Enrico Rava, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, pianist Paul Bley, drummer Han Bennink and guitarist Nguyen Le; none of these appear in his Discogs credits, so they are reported here as stated in press biographies rather than independently verified.

Ottaviano's catalog sits squarely in the European free-jazz and free-improvisation tradition that runs from Steve Lacy's postwar soprano vocabulary through the Ictus Records/Instabile Orchestra generation of Italian improvisers. Discogs style tags across his leader catalog read almost entirely as Free Jazz, Avant-Garde Jazz, Free Improvisation and Contemporary Jazz, with only his earliest 1980s sideman work and a handful of chamber-adjacent dates (the Hawkins duos, the Godard duos) drifting toward a more composed, Contemporary Jazz idiom. The soprano and sopranino saxophone, inherited directly from his years studying with Lacy, remain his signature voices; a parallel thread runs through his pedagogical and historical work (the Bari conservatory jazz chair since 1989, his book on the saxophone's history), and a late-career thread, Eternal Love, turns his improvising directly toward African musical culture and politics.