Tiziano Tononi was born in Milan on November 18, 1956. He taught himself drums in a pop and rock idiom as a teenager before turning toward jazz and classical percussion in his late teens, later studying in New York with drummers Andrew Cyrille and Bob Moses. Working in Milan's jazz scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he joined the Democratic Orchestra Milano and, December 1980, co-founded Nexus with tenor and baritone saxophonist Daniele Cavallanti - a working duo and sextet that has stayed active for more than four decades and has been named best group multiple times in Musica Jazz's annual Top Jazz critics' poll. Their debut as Nexus, Open Mouth Blues (1983, Red Record), carried liner notes by Enrico Rava and featured Pino Minafra on trumpet and flugelhorn.

Tononi and Cavallanti built Nexus into one of the longest-running ensembles in Italian jazz, documented across eleven-plus albums: The Preacher & The Ghost (1991, dedicated to Albert Ayler), a triple album paying tribute to Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1999, Splasc(h)), Rivers Of Dreams (Live At Radio3) (2004, with Achille Succi and Roberto Cecchetto), Spirits Up Above (2006, with bassist William Parker and violinist Emanuele Parrini), and Rings Of Fire (2008, with Succi, Giovanni Maier, Parrini and guest violinist Jenny Scheinman). The group's expanded big-band incarnation, The Nexus Orchestra, released the double album Seize The Time! (2002), conducted in part by trombonist Roswell Rudd and featuring Italian Instabile Orchestra regulars Roberto Ottaviano, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Sandro Satta, Paolino Dalla Porta and trumpeter Luca Calabrese. Nexus continues to perform and record into the 2020s, including The Call: For A New Life (2021) and Nexus Plays Dolphy (2024), both with vibraphonist Luca Gusella.

Alongside Nexus, Tononi co-founded the group Moon on the Water in the mid-1980s and, in the 1990s, became a founding member of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, the large collective free-jazz ensemble that brought together much of Italy's avant-garde scene; he appears on at least ten of its Discogs-documented releases between 1992 and 2025, including sessions with guest soloists Anthony Braxton (Creative Orchestra (Bolzano) 2007) and Cecil Taylor (The Owner Of The River Bank, 2003). He also played in the Jazz Chromatic Ensemble, co-led the Multiphonics Tuba Trio with Renato Geremia and tuba player Michel Godard from 1997, and recorded in a trio with trombonist Beppe Caruso. As a leader outside Nexus, his catalog includes Ketchup (1995, with Maier, Cecchetto, Cavallanti and pianist Alberto Tacchini), a 1990 trio session billed to trumpeter Guido Mazzon, pianist Umberto Petrin and Tononi (Other Line), Vertical Invaders (2010, Black Saint, with William Parker and Parrini), and River Tales (Our Dreams Are Still Alive!) (2015, with singers Tiziana Ghiglioni and Jay Clayton).

Tononi has also led tribute projects built around the repertoire of the classic 1960s avant-garde - Tiziano Tononi & The Ornettians (Ornette Coleman), and recordings dedicated to John Coltrane and Don Cherry - and more recent ensembles including Southbound, the Awake Nu Quartet, Geometric(s), and Tiziano Tononi & The Pahé Sâpa Ensemble, whose Winter Counts (We'll Still Be Here!) (2023, Felmay) is dedicated to the history and rights of Native American peoples and features a large international cast including Joe Fonda, Bobby Lee Rodgers, Piero Bittolo Bon, Beppe Scardino, Domenico Caliri, Gusella and Parrini. His 2017 solo percussion album Portraits Of My Soul (Solo Percussion Music For The Third Millennium) and his ongoing duo with Parrini - The Many Moods Of Interaction (2022) and Other Interactions ...On July 5th (2024, with Andrea Grossi on double bass and Roberto Ottaviano on soprano saxophone) - continue into the most recent part of his catalog, alongside Landscapes Volume 1 (Songs In Opposition) (2025) and The Code Talkers (2026), both on Felmay.

Across the 1980s and 1990s his credited sideman and guest work also includes sessions with Attilio Zanchi (Early Spring, 1987), Gianluigi Trovesi (Les Boîtes à Musique, 1989), American saxophonist David Liebman (The Blessing Of The Old, Long Sound, 1990), the Daniele Cavallanti Quartet featuring American tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman (Times For Peace, 1994), Giancarlo Schiaffini's own groups, and a long-running series of appearances, beginning in 1987, on Milanese composer Dino Betti van der Noot's orchestral recordings, continuing into the 2020s.

Tononi's playing sits at the center of Italy's free-jazz and improvised-music avant-garde: a drummer and multi-percussionist equally at home on a standard kit, hand drums (udu, djembe, frame drum), and an expanding battery of gongs, bells and found metal, in the tradition of the American free-jazz percussionists - Andrew Cyrille chief among them - he studied with directly. His core work, in Nexus with Cavallanti and in his long-running duo with violinist Emanuele Parrini, draws its repertoire and spirit from the classic American avant-garde of the 1960s: Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Don Cherry and Albert Ayler all appear as the subjects of dedicated tribute projects across his catalog. That same commitment to the music's political and historical dimension carries into later projects like Winter Counts, built around Native American history and rights, and his membership in the Italian Instabile Orchestra, the collective ensemble that defined Italy's large-group free-jazz identity through the 1990s and 2000s.