Roberto Maria Zorzi was born in 1962 in Verona, Italy. He started out on drums, electric bass and trombone before settling on guitar, drawn first to Eric Clapton and then, decisively, to Derek Bailey, whose non-idiomatic, extended-technique improvising became the central reference point for his own playing. In the mid-1980s he served as co-artistic director of the Verona Jazz festival alongside Nicola Tessitore, a role that ran through the festival's late-1980s years before ending around 1988-89.

With his quintet NAD (Niù Abdominaux Dangereux), Zorzi won the "Indipendenti 87" competition staged by the magazine Fare Musica; the group's resulting 1989 album Ghosts (Heron Music), recorded under a set of invented stage names for its members, drew comparisons to Albert Ayler and was later cited in Enrico Merlin's reference work "1000 Dischi per un Secolo." That same year, Zorzi served as guitarist and, per his Discogs credit, project coordinator on Capriccio a Milano (Similado, 1989/1990), an ensemble date that brought together trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, soprano saxophonist Roberto Ottaviano, pianist Franco D'Andrea, bassist Paolo Damiani, percussionist Trilok Gurtu and cellist Ernst Reijseger.

Through the 1990s and 2000s Zorzi worked at the edges of jazz, free improvisation and art rock, rarely leading a stable working band for long and instead building a career from one-off duo and project billings. In 1994 he joined British drummers Chris Cutler and Charles Hayward, with the Italian art-rock group La 1919, on Jouer . Spielen . To Play (Materiali Sonori), tagged on Discogs as rock rather than jazz. Five years later came Through (Materiali Sonori, 1999), an eighteen-track duo album with American avant-garde guitarist Henry Kaiser that includes a piece dedicated to Paolo Damiani. In 2001, Beyond (Auditorium Edizioni) teamed him in a trio with drummer Joey Baron and guitarist/saxophonist Elliott Sharp, tagged Free Jazz and Free Improvisation on Discogs.

His connection to Andrea Centazzo's Ictus Records ran across several projects: he appears on Centazzo's double-disc anthology Guitars (2009) and on the label's 2012 Ictus World Music Collection and 35th Anniversary Collection, and produced Centazzo, Akira Sakata and Kiyoto Fujiwara's Bridges (2012). In 2011, Ictus also released Bang!, on which Zorzi is credited as electric guitarist and "artistic director" of a septet drawn from the American jazz and downtown-scene world: saxophonist Tim Berne, drummer Bobby Previte, violinist Mark Feldman, trumpeter Herb Robertson, bassist Percy Jones and keyboardist Matteo Ederle.

Later recordings kept pulling from both sides of the Atlantic: the 2015 duo EP Grass, part of guitarist Noël Akchoté's Guitar Duets Series; Facanàpa & Umarells and the World Wide Crash (2018, Kutmusic), a trio with Bay Area musicians Scott Amendola (drums, electronics) and Michael Manring (electric bass); and, closer to home, a Dodicilune-label quartet project with bassists Luca Crispino and Danilo Gallo and drummer Luca Pighi, which produced Le Quattro Verità (2022) and, with saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti added to the lineup, le cinque verità (2025). A further 2022 trio session with Scott Amendola, Jason Hoopes and Elliott Sharp, Four Corners Make a Circle, was reviewed by the website Something Else! Reviews but is not yet catalogued on Discogs.

All About Jazz profiled Zorzi in 2022 under the headline "esplorazione senza confini" ("exploration without boundaries"), describing a guitarist whose range runs from Robert Fripp and Brian Eno through Derek Bailey's free improvisation into Delta blues and Ornette Coleman, and calling him one of Italy's most consistent researchers in the Bailey tradition of extended improvised guitar.

A different, younger guitarist and guitar teacher also named Roberto Zorzi (born 1987, a graduate of the Rock Institute Music College and Trinity College of Music, and leader of the rock bands Less Is More and Black Hole) is unrelated to the musician profiled here; this profile covers only the Verona-born improviser documented under Discogs artist id 348379.

Zorzi's discography sits mainly in avant-garde jazz and free improvisation, with a free-improvising guitar language built on Derek Bailey's extended-technique vocabulary rather than on jazz's harmonic tradition. Discogs genre and style tags across his leader and co-leader catalog run Jazz, Free Jazz, Free Improvisation, Avant-Garde Jazz and Jazz-Rock, with a handful of outlying dates (Jouer . Spielen . To Play, the NAD art-rock project Ghosts) tagged Rock or Art Rock instead, reflecting an eclecticism his own interviewers have struggled to pin to one genre. What anchors his catalog in jazz, rather than in rock or pure sound art, is the company he has consistently kept: European and American improvisers and jazz musicians including Franco D'Andrea, Paolo Damiani, Trilok Gurtu, Albert Mangelsdorff, Tim Berne, Bobby Previte, Mark Feldman, Joey Baron, Elliott Sharp and Andrea Centazzo, almost all Discogs-credited alongside him on specific releases.