Sebastiano Alioto is a Palermo-based Sicilian drummer long associated with the Brass Group, the Palermo jazz institution that also runs the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana (the Sicilian Jazz Orchestra). As of the orchestra's September 2026 concert at Palermo's Teatro Massimo, he continues to hold a drum chair in its rhythm section, a role documented back to a studio credit on the orchestra's own 2007 live album. His exact birth date and birthplace are not publicly documented. What is established is the start of his performing career: at age 14, in a 1975 concert in a public piazza in Campofelice di Roccella, a town on Sicily's Tyrrhenian coast near Palermo, playing progressive rock under the influence of Keith Emerson.

He studied drums and percussion with Giuseppe Cataldo, a longtime percussion instructor and orchestra director at the Conservatorio di Palermo, and has also been named in profile pieces as a student, in masterclass or clinic settings, of drummers Bruno Biriaco, Agostino Marangolo, Tullio De Piscopo, Peter Erskine and Claudio Mastracci - a reported teaching lineage that is not independently confirmed at the recording-credit level for any of those individual names. His early jazz work in Palermo put him alongside vibraphonist Enzo Randisi, trumpeter Cicci Santucci and visiting American saxophonist Steve Grossman. Through the 1980s and 1990s he split his time in the Sicilian scene between the Brass Group Big Band, where he played drums in the rhythm section from 1983 to 1984, two years touring with the Genoese progressive-rock group New Trolls, studio work backing Italian pop singers Ornella Vanoni, Antonella Ruggiero and Francesco Baccini, and RAI session dates behind visiting American vocalists Dionne Warwick and José Feliciano. He also played drums in pianist Tony Vella's Fusion Jazz Band during the 1990s.

His Discogs-documented recording credits run from 2007 to 2022 and are overwhelmingly jazz. He plays drums on the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana's own Music & Wine Live (2007, Duplison), recorded with the Sicilian wine producer Donnafugata and featuring American guests Eliot Zigmund and Bill Moring; drums on Flora Faja's Italian Songs (2009, Philology), a set of Italian standards reworked with guest horns Fabrizio Bosso and Francesco Cafiso; and drums on the Francesco Buzzurro Quartet's self-issued Naxos (released December 2006), alongside guitarist Francesco Buzzurro. A fourth Discogs credit, Rebirth (2022, self-released, again with Donnafugata and the Brass Group), lists him in a curatorial role rather than as a performer. His only non-jazz Discogs credit is an early instrumental B-side, "Ikowa" (Near, a funk/disco 7-inch single), which he performed solo.

Alongside performing, Alioto has taught at the Brass Group Foundation's own Scuola Popolare di Musica in Palermo, and in 1991 he founded the gospel-inflected Palermo Spiritual Ensemble. His most recent public project is Brasil Fala Italiano, a Brazilian-songbook ensemble that press coverage credits him with originating; it debuted at Palermo's Real Teatro Santa Cecilia in April 2026, and coverage of the project credits him with having had the opportunity to play alongside Brazilian guitarist and songwriter Toquinho. That project, together with his continuing chair in the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana, are his two active, publicly documented engagements as of 2026.

Alioto's musical identity is that of a section and ensemble drummer within the orchestral and big-band jazz tradition, shaped early by progressive-rock power drumming before he redirected into jazz and commercial session work. Palermo jazz figures have described him in those terms: Brass Group maestro Ignazio Garsia called him "sanguine and explosive, a classic big-band drummer," and pianist Tony Vella called him a natural talent. His three performing-credit Discogs recordings sit at different points of a working drummer's catalog: the large-ensemble orchestral jazz of Music & Wine Live, the vocal-jazz songbook of Italian Songs, and the smaller acoustic/world-leaning quartet session of Naxos. His own side projects, the gospel-rooted Palermo Spiritual Ensemble and the Brazilian-songbook Brasil Fala Italiano, extend that same big-band, section-player sensibility into smaller, genre-crossing formats rather than into a leader's recorded catalog of his own.