Simone Massaron was born in Milan in 1971 into a musical household: his father Sergio was an orchestra conductor and pianist, and Massaron started on piano at four before moving through drums and bass and settling on guitar around age ten. By sixteen he was touring Europe in a rock band, and for the rest of his teens and twenties he worked across rock, blues and jazz before committing to jazz guitar and studying with Roberto Cecchetto, already profiled on this site as one of the Italian scene's most frequently credited guitarists. Masterclasses with Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell followed, and Massaron also trained in guitar lutherie, a discipline he has carried into a parallel career modifying and building his own instruments.

That instrument-building side of his work centers on the fretless electric guitar, an instrument he has spent two decades researching; in 2006 he was invited to New York's Fretless Guitar Festival on the strength of that work. His recorded catalogue, verified against the Discogs API under a single unambiguous artist entity (ID 1533581, profile text "Italian guitarist, born in 1971"), runs to 26 release-relationship credits between 2002 and 2024: six as leader, nineteen as a sideman or featured guest, and one composer credit on a various-artists compilation. Twenty-two of the twenty-six carry a Jazz genre tag on Discogs, with Avant-garde Jazz, Free Improvisation and Contemporary Jazz the most frequent style tags; the remaining handful sit in blues, alternative rock and electronic-hip-hop territory, reflecting an artist whose stated musical language (per guitarist Marc Ribot's own description of him) sits at the junction of "the improvising traditions of Derek Bailey/Fred Frith and rock/free jazz."

His leader catalogue opens with The Common Man (2002, La Fonoteca), a duo with drummer Carlo Virzi, and continues with Breaking News (2005, released 2006, Long Song Records), his first album with American guitarist Elliott Sharp, who plays electric and lap steel guitar alongside Massaron, with saxophonist Daniele Cavallanti on tenor, drummer Tiziano Tononi and bassist-vocalist Steve Piccolo. Long Song Records became his main label through the 2000s and brought him into contact with American guitarists Nels Cline and Marc Ribot: Massaron plays electric, fretless and baritone guitar alongside Cline on Daniele Cavallanti's Electric Unit album Smoke Inside (2006), and alongside Ribot, pianist Giorgio Pacorig and keyboardist Alfonso Santimone on Giovanni Maier Technicolor's Featuring Marc Ribot + A Turtle Soup (2007), both Discogs-confirmed credit-level connections.

Dandelions On Fire (2008, Long Song Records), featuring American vocalist Carla Bozulich, is the one record in his catalogue Discogs tags Rock and Alternative Rock rather than Jazz; Massaron produced it, wrote the music and played guitars, banjo and pump organ, and it was reported in press coverage of the period to have been received warmly by specialist critics and named among the best records of 2008. He returned to a jazz idiom with Furore (2018, Long Song Records), tagged Jazz, Blues and Folk/World/Country on Discogs, and with his two most recent leader releases: The Big Empty (2011, El Gallo Rojo), a solo album of guitar, loops and objects tagged Free Improvisation, and One (2024, Creative Sources), a collectively composed trio with tenor and soprano saxophonist Riccardo Luppi and double bassist Daniel Studer.

Across the 2000s and 2010s Massaron built a dense network of credits inside Italy's free-jazz and improvised-music circle centered on the labels Long Song Records and El Gallo Rojo. He is Discogs-credited on electric guitar, lap steel, baritone guitar and slide guitar on Tiziano Tononi & The Ornettians' Peace Warriors (Forgotten Children) Volume Two (2007, Black Saint), alongside saxophonist Tiziana Ghiglioni on voice and guitarist Roberto Cecchetto; on guitar on two further albums credited to Ghiglioni, A Male Walking In The Cauldron (2009, with double bassist Silvia Bolognesi and saxophonist Piero Bittolo Bon) and Figli (2011); on electric guitar, baritone guitar and loops alongside Bittolo Bon and American bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma on Mucho Acustica (2011, Long Song Records); and on guitar, fuzz bass and banjo on Jusi In The Wine House (2009, Long Song Records, Bon Pour Les Grands Et Les Petits!). He also plays dobro, electric guitar and live sampler on The Humans' It's Nine O'Clock (2011, El Gallo Rojo), guitar on the El Gallo Rojo label sampler El Dias de Los Muertos (2013, alongside bassist Giulio Corini and saxophonists Achille Succi, Beppe Scardino and Francesco Bigoni), electric and acoustic guitar on The Sauna Session (2014, Long Song Records, PBB's Lacus Amoenus, with Bittolo Bon and American trumpeter Peter Evans), and guitar again on Giovanni Maier Technicolor's Live In Milano (2017, with American drummer Scott Amendola).

Since 2021 Massaron's main working group has been saxophonist Claudio Fasoli's NeXt 4et, a standing quartet with bassist Tito Mangialajo Rantzer and drummer Stefano Grasso that has released three albums for Abeat Records, Next (2021), Ambush (2023) and Hasard (2024), the first of which was voted the best Italian jazz CD of 2021 in Musica Jazz's Top Jazz critics' referendum. He also plays guitar as a guest on violinist Daniele Richiedei and Giulio Corini's Duo Imperfetto (2022), alongside accordionist Fausto Beccalossi, vibraphonist Andrea Dulbecco and vocalist Simona Severini, and plays electric guitar, loops and effects on drummer Ferdinando Faraò's The Space Improvising Company session Geiger [Volume 1] (2019, Setola Di Maiale). A 2015 composition credit, "Willie," appears on the Clean Feed various-artists compilation I Never Meta Guitar Three, compiled by Elliott Sharp.

Massaron teaches guitar at the American School of Milan, where he works with students on reading music and improvising across rock, jazz and classical styles, and has taught pop and rock guitar composition and arranging at the Conservatorio "Luca Marenzio" in Brescia. He also teaches at Milan's Civica Scuola di Musica "Bill Evans." His own site and Long Song Records' artist page also name American guitarist Rob Mazurek among his wider circle of collaborators; that connection is reported here as a biographical claim rather than an independently confirmed Discogs credit.

Massaron's guitar language runs across radical improvisation, free jazz, pre-war blues and silent-film rescoring, built on heavy instrument modification: fretless electric and baritone guitars, lap steel, prepared acoustic guitar and live looping all recur across his catalogue, often within the same record. Marc Ribot's description of him as a player "literate in both the improvising traditions of Derek Bailey/Fred Frith and rock/free jazz" matches the shape of his discography, which moves between fully improvised duo and trio sessions (The Common Man, The Big Empty, One), roots-adjacent song-based records (Breaking News, Dandelions On Fire, Furore) and a dense set of guest credits inside Italy's Long Song Records and El Gallo Rojo-affiliated free-jazz scene, the same cooperative circle that produced Daniele Cavallanti, Giovanni Maier and Piero Bittolo Bon. His standing role since 2021 in Claudio Fasoli's NeXt 4et, playing electric guitar and electronics opposite a veteran tenor and soprano saxophonist, places him inside a more conventional small-group jazz format than most of his own leader dates, a pairing Fasoli's own biography credits with widening the textural range of his late-career quartet writing.