Tiziana Ghiglioni is the singer the previous generation of Italian jazz was built around, and the one most often missing from accounts of it written outside Italy.

She was born in Savona, on the Ligurian coast, on 25 October 1956, and did not grow up inside the music. Hearing Archie Shepp play is what turned her toward jazz. What turned that into a career was a workshop run by Giorgio Gaslini in 1979; she ended up singing in Gaslini's big band, and studied voice technique alongside it with the soprano Gabriella Ravazzi. One of her earliest professional engagements was a theatre tour of a Shakespeare and Ellington programme with Gaslini and the actor Giorgio Albertazzi.

Her debut, Lonely Woman (Dischi Della Quercia, 1981), is co-billed to five musicians: Ghiglioni, Larry Nocella, Riccardo Zegna, Piero Leveratto and Luigi Bonafede. Arrigo Polillo, who wrote the standard Italian history of the music, reviewed it favourably. Two years later she recorded Sounds Of Love with Kenny Drew on piano, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass and Barry Altschul on drums, which is an unusually strong second album for a singer that early in a career.

The stretch that defines her international reputation runs 1991 to 1993. In those three years she made Lyrics, a duo with Paul Bley; I'll Be Around with Mal Waldron and Enrico Rava; Up And Down on Black Saint with Chico Freeman and Waldron again; and So Many Stars on Philology with Lee Konitz and the pianist Stefano Battaglia. Sitting inside that run is SONB, short for Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, made for the Milanese label Splasc(h) in 1992 with Steve Lacy, Rava, Gianluigi Trovesi and the trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, with whom she had already cut a duo record in 1987. Musica Jazz voted SONB the second-best album of the year, and the magazine's director at the time, Pino Candini, called her the first lady of Italian jazz. The phrase has followed her since.

Earlier, in 1991, Philology had released Goodbye, Chet, recorded with the pianist Mike Melillo roughly two months after Chet Baker passed away in May 1988.

The other half of her catalogue is entirely Italian, and it is the half that places her in this tradition rather than a generic international one. In 1994 she released Tiziana Ghiglioni canta Luigi Tenco on Philology and won the Targa Tenco, the award the Club Tenco gives for Italian songwriting. Tenco was a Ligurian songwriter who took his own life at the Sanremo festival in January 1967, at 28; Ghiglioni grew up roughly forty kilometres from where he did. She returned to his songs on Tenco In Jazz (1998) and again on Non Sono Io (2010), sixteen years after the first record. She did the same with Lucio Battisti on Battisti! (1998) and A Lucio Battisti 2 (2000), and with Duke Ellington on My Essential Duke Ellington (1998).

In 1995 she recorded Tiziana Ghiglioni Sings Gaslini for Soul Note: a full album of the compositions of the man who had taught her sixteen years earlier and taken her into his big band. She continued to appear on his own records, on Song Book Vol. II (2001) and Song Book (2006).

She worked steadily with the pianist Renato Sellani from the turn of the 2000s, on the paired albums Volare and Poetica and then across his long Italian Saga series through 2007, including Ciao Kramer (2003) alongside Fabrizio Bosso. So Long Flores (Splasc(h), 2004) is dedicated to the pianist Luca Flores, who passed away in 1995.

Her catalogue sits almost entirely on small Italian independents, Splasc(h) and Philology above all, with two records on Black Saint and one on Soul Note. That distribution is the practical reason a listener outside Italy can follow this music for years without meeting her name.

She teaches jazz voice at conservatory level, currently in Rovigo and previously in Cuneo, and divides her time between Genoa and Milan. She was nominated Best Jazz Singer at the Italian Jazz Awards in 2007 and 2010, chaired the artistic commission of the third Italian Jazz Awards in 2009, and won the Iseo prize in 2005. Her most recent album under her own name is No Baby (Dodicilune, 2017), with the alto saxophonist Steve Potts and the pianist Gianni Lenoci.

Ghiglioni came to jazz through Archie Shepp rather than through the standards repertoire, and that origin shows: she is a singer equally at home inside a song and outside it, which is why players from the free and avant-garde end of the music kept hiring her. Steve Lacy, Paul Bley, Mal Waldron and Chico Freeman are not names that appear on the records of a conventional standards singer.

Her formal training was split between Gaslini's jazz workshop and classical vocal technique with a soprano, and the combination produced a voice with real control at the extremes of its range and a willingness to treat the voice as an instrument in a horn section rather than as a soloist to be accompanied. On SONB she is unmistakably leading a band that contains three of the strongest improvisers in European jazz.

The Italian song repertoire is the other pole of her work. Her Tenco and Battisti records are not novelty crossovers; she returned to Tenco three times across sixteen years, and the approach treats those songs as a body of composition worth the same interpretive seriousness as Ellington's.