Alessandro "Sandro" Cerino was born in Naples on September 30, 1958. His father was a musician, and Cerino picked up the family passion early; after finishing a classical secondary education, he turned to formal clarinet study before building himself into one of Italian jazz's most versatile reed and flute doublers. His real break came by accident: at the Ischia Jazz Festival around 1979, the young Neapolitan sat in on an unscheduled jam session, a performance that redirected his career toward jazz. Critic Franco Fayenz took note of him in 1982, the same year Cerino moved to Milan, a city he has described choosing because he saw it as Europe's jazz capital. He played Umbria Jazz in 1982 and the Clusone, Padova and Milano festivals through 1985.

By the late 1980s Cerino was recording as a leader and in-demand sideman at once. He founded the Sandro Cerino Action Quartet with pianist Claudio Angeleri, bassist Ares Tavolazzi, cellist Bernardino Penazzi and drummer Federico Monti, cutting Tom Thumb in the Magic Castle (1987) and Che Fine Hanno Fatto I Personaggi Dei Sogni (1989), both for Splasc(h) Records and both Discogs-confirmed with Cerino on reeds, flute, composition and production; engineer Giancarlo Barigozzi, who also engineered Mingus: Portrait in Six Colours below, worked on the latter. A second Action Quartet lineup, with Mario Rusca, Riccardo Fioravanti and Giampiero Prina, recorded Dove Portano I Campi Di Fianco Alle Autostrade (1995, Mingus Live Production); vocalist Daniela Panetta appears on that session as well, the first documented step in what became a long creative partnership. In the same stretch Cerino joined saxophonist Roberto Ottaviano's group Six Mobiles, credited on clarinets and flute on Mingus: Portrait in Six Colours (1988, featuring vocalist Tiziana Ghiglioni) and on Items From The Old Earth (1991); Musica Jazz magazine ranked Six Mobiles the second-best Italian jazz group of 1991. He also formed the reeds-only Atipico Trio with Carlo Actis Dato and Stefano Corradi, whose Gone With The Winds (1999, Splasc(h)) was named among the year's 100 best albums in France and was well received across Europe and in Japan.

Cerino's sideman work ran in parallel on a second, more experimental track: a long-running partnership with composer Giovanni Venosta and multi-instrumentalist Roberto Musci produced a string of ambient and world-fusion albums for the UK label ReR/Recommended between 1983 and 1997 (Olympic Signals, Water Messages On Desert Sand, Urban And Tribal Portraits, A Noise, A Sound, Losing The Orthodox Path), and the same Venosta connection carried into film, scoring Silvio Soldini's Un'Anima Divisa In Due (1993) and Agata E La Tempesta (2004) alongside Cristina Comencini's Va' Dove Ti Porta Il Cuore (1995). Cerino built a substantial composing career for cinema and television in his own right, with film and documentary credits running from the 1990s through About A War (2018) and television arranging work for RAI and Fininvest programs (including Fantastico and Scherzi A Parte) dating back to 1983 - a commercial sideline that has run the length of his career alongside his jazz work, not instead of it.

In 1989, Cerino also played on saxophonist Antonio Scarano's Hot Blend, a session that featured a young Roberta Gambarini on vocals; Discogs separately documents a Cerino sideman credit on Gambarini and Scarano's own co-led session Apreslude (1991, Splasc(h)). In 1998, Cerino joined the jazz vocal group Vocaland for En Voyage (Caligola Records), reinterpreting standards including John Coltrane's "Naima." The following year he was credited as composer and arranger on Daniela Panetta's Fasi Comunicanti, and by 2005 the two had formalized their duo as Ampio Respiro, recording Melodia Incantata (2005, Splasc(h) Records) with Cerino's name alongside Panetta's on the Discogs release credit for saxophone, flutes, bass clarinet, arranging and production; the duo's self-titled Ampio Respiro followed on the Q disc label. All About Jazz reviewed the pairing. In 2007 Cerino released Schegge, a self-produced record on which he also handled the graphic design and photography.

In 2000, Cerino founded and began conducting his own Crescendo Big Band, debuting Vivaldi's Four Seasons (Agorà Musica), a full jazz-big-band reworking of Vivaldi on which he plays alto, soprano and sopranino saxophone, bass and contrabass clarinet, flute, bass flute and ocarina, alongside pianist Arrigo Cappelletti and trumpeter Alberto Mandarini. A live recording of the same project, I Colori Delle Stagioni, was taped March 20, 2004, at the Sala Verdi of the Milan Conservatory and issued on Edizioni Curci, bundled with issue 100 of the Italian magazine Suonare News. From 2005 onward Cerino became a settled member of composer Dino Betti van der Noot's orchestra, credited on saxophone across nearly two decades of releases beginning with Ithaca/Ithaki (2005, which also credits trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini) and running through The Humming Cloud (2007), September's New Moon (2011), The Stuff Dreams Are Made On (2013), Notes Are But Wind (2015), Où Sont Les Notes D'Antan? (2017) and Let Us Recount Our Dreams (2023) - one of the longest standing-member relationships in his discography, alongside fellow orchestra regular Mandarini.

Cerino's own-name catalog continued with The Flute Connection (2011), a suite he composed and arranged for five Italian concert flutists - Maurizio Simeoli, Bruno Grossi, Francesco Loi, Salvatore Lombardi and Luisa Sello - produced under the patronage of Italy's national flutists' association. In December 2014, Milan's Auditorium laVerdi marked his 35th year in music with a concert in which Cerino conducted the Orchestra Sinfonica Giuseppe Verdi di Milano in a program of classic Neapolitan songs rewritten in jazz style; a related project, "La Mia Napoli," paired him with pianist and conductor Enrico Intra's Civica Jazz Band and vocalist Laura Fedele at Milan's Piccolo Teatro. He has also led Orchestra dei Popoli, an educational project built around street musicians, largely of Roma background, that culminated in a concert at the Sala Verdi. By his own account he had reached 40 years in music by 2022 and remains active as a composer, arranger and bandleader.

Cerino identifies Igor Stravinsky as his primary compositional touchstone, and that classical-plus-jazz instinct runs through his career: arranging Vivaldi for a jazz big band, rewriting Neapolitan song repertoire for a symphony orchestra, and scoring suites for concert flutists are all part of the same impulse to move jazz improvisation across formal lines rather than keep it in one lane. As a player, his identity is built on doubling: alto, soprano, tenor, baritone and sopranino saxophones alongside soprano, bass and contrabass clarinet and a full flute family (concert, alto, bass) plus ocarina, a range that let him function as a one-person reed section across free-jazz-leaning small groups (Six Mobiles, the Atipico Trio) and large jazz ensembles (his own Crescendo Big Band, Dino Betti van der Noot's orchestra) alike. Six Mobiles' Charles Mingus tribute and the Atipico Trio's unaccompanied-reeds format place an avant-garde and free-jazz sensibility at the center of his small-group work, while his big-band leadership and long-running orchestra membership root him equally in large-ensemble jazz writing and arranging. Alongside that jazz identity, Cerino has sustained a long parallel career arranging for Italian television and composing for film and theater since 1983 - steady commercial work that has run alongside his jazz catalog for over four decades rather than displacing it.