U.T. Gandhi was born Umberto Trombetta on April 17, 1960, in San Daniele del Friuli, in Italy's Friuli region, and he spent nearly all of his life a few kilometers away, in the small town of Osoppo. He was self-taught, and the story he told about how he found music is tied to a specific disaster: the 1976 Friuli earthquake destroyed his family's house, and his own drum kit survived the collapse. In the aftermath, the Italian progressive-rock band Area came to Friuli for a solidarity concert, and meeting them became one of the formative moments of his musical education. He came to jazz specifically in 1978 and built a professional career out of it that ran for more than four decades, taking him to concert stages across Europe, Canada, Japan, South America, Africa and Asia.

He filled in the gaps of his self-taught background with seminars under some of the drum chair's best-known names: Jimmy Cobb (best known for his work with Miles Davis), Tommy Campbell at Umbria Jazz, and Peter Erskine at the Ravenna Jazz and Udine Jazz seminars. The defining engagement of his career came in the 1990s, when he spent eight years as the drummer in Enrico Rava's Electric Five, touring Italy, Europe, Canada and Japan alongside one of Italian jazz's most important trumpeters. Discogs-verified recordings from that period include Electric Five (1995) and Certi Angoli Segreti (1998), both billed to Rava, plus a credit on the compilation Italian Ballads (1996) and on Note Necessarie (2004); Gandhi's own account of the period also names the Rava-Carmen, L'Opera va and Ragazzi Selvaggi projects, the last performed with the Rovigo Symphony Orchestra, though those specific titles are not independently itemized under his own Discogs credits.

Beyond the Rava years, Gandhi built one of the most densely cross-referenced sideman careers in Friulian jazz. He recorded and toured Europe with the Argentine bandoneonist Dino Saluzzi, whose group carries ties to the ECM label, and in 2007 he worked as an assistant engineer on American saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell's Composition / Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3, a Transatlantic Art Ensemble session produced by ECM founder Manfred Eicher at Artesuono Studios in Cavalicco, near Udine, where Gandhi worked often alongside studio owner and engineer Stefano Amerio. His own discography as a leader includes Hasta Siempre (1994, with pianist Claudio Cojaniz and bassist Giovanni Maier), the U.T. Gandhi Ensemble's big-group record Cjale Ce Sere (1998, featuring Enrico Rava on trumpet alongside a cast of Friulian musicians), his self-titled 1997 solo percussion record, the 2001 duo album Short Stories, Belfagor (2007), Three Lines (2007, a trio with saxophonist Achille Succi and Maier), and U.T. Gandhi Plays Weather Report Music (2010), a 40th-anniversary tribute to the fusion band whose influence runs through much of his playing.

In 2010 he was invited as a guest drummer for the historic reunion of Area International POPular Group, the same band whose post-earthquake concert had shaped his teenage years, playing a run of Italian dates with the group that had given him his start. Later leader projects kept him moving between formats: he was the drummer in pianist Guido Santoni's trio (Inside A Dream, 2010; Fit To Fly, 2015), joined pianist Claudio Filippini and bassist Andrea Lombardini for Two Grounds (2018, C.A.M. Jazz), and recorded Song Book No.1 (2019) and the live album Live In Hong Kong (2020) with saxophonist Enzo Favata's Glocal Report. A regional tourism portal for Friuli Venezia Giulia credits him with more than 150 CDs recorded across his career for a range of labels, most consistently Artesuono and Nota.

Gandhi's work outside the concert hall was substantial and, by his own account, meant as much to him as the touring. For eight years he ran concerts, percussion courses and ensemble-music workshops inside the prisons of Udine, Pordenone, Gorizia and Tolmezzo, work that produced its own recordings made together with the inmates. He also composed for contemporary dance and video art and collaborated with theater companies across Friuli Venezia Giulia, and he ran his own small label imprint, Mahatmamusic, distributed through Artesuono.

He kept recording and performing into his final weeks. Farewell Dance (2025, Artesuono), a 17-track album on which he played not only drums and percussion but piano, Fender Rhodes, electric bass, keyboards, samplers and electronics, opened with a track titled "Os-Opum," a nod to Osoppo, the town where he had chosen to live out his life. In 2026 he released Dialoghi, a duo album with guitarist Marco Bianchi on Artesuono, built on improvisation that moved between jazz, rock, ambient music and electronics; the pair presented it live at the Udin&Jazz festival on July 18, 2026. Just three days before his death, on August 7, 2026, he played drums with the Organ Madness Trio at the Carniarmonie festival in the Carnia and Alto Friuli area. U.T. Gandhi died suddenly on August 10, 2026, at his home in Osoppo, after being taken ill, at the age of 66. He was survived by his wife, Tania Genova, and his daughter, Irene.

Gandhi's catalog runs from the plugged-in fusion of Weather Report, whose music he devoted a full tribute album to, through the electric, horn-driven sound of Enrico Rava's Electric Five, to the freer, chamber-scaled improvisation of his later duo and trio work. His studio engineering connection to Roscoe Mitchell and the ECM-affiliated Transatlantic Art Ensemble placed him adjacent to the European free-improvisation scene even where he wasn't credited as a player. A recurring thread throughout his career was Friuli itself: his own ensemble records drew on local musicians, his social work used music inside the region's prisons, and his final album opened with a piece named for the town where he lived his entire life. He was also an unusually versatile multi-instrumentalist for a drummer by trade, adding piano, Fender Rhodes, electric bass, keyboards, samplers, loops, theremin and a range of hand percussion to his later leader albums.