Vincenzo Mazzone is an Italian jazz drummer and percussionist based in Puglia, in Italy's south, whose own Discogs artist entry describes him simply as "Italian jazz drummer." His recorded history runs from 1983 to 2025 and sits almost entirely inside Italy's avant-garde and free jazz scene, built around two long-standing relationships: a founding-era place in the Italian Instabile Orchestra, the eighteen-piece big band formed in 1990 around the Noci jazz festival, and a collaboration with trumpeter Pino Minafra that press coverage describes as running "over thirty years" across several of Minafra's own groups, including the Pino Minafra Quintet, Pino Minafra Sud Ensemble and, more recently, the MinAfrìc Orchestra.

Before his jazz career took its current shape, Mazzone held the percussion chair in the orchestra of Bari's Teatro Petruzzelli opera house, a post he held until the theatre's catastrophic 1991 fire. He is currently a percussion instruments instructor at the Conservatorio di Musica "Nino Rota" in Monopoli, alongside colleagues Stefano Baldoni and Tommaso Cotrufo. He also founded his own ensemble, the Sud Percussion Group, and has worked with Italian cymbal and drum maker UFIP Italia since 2003 on experimental percussion projects, and performs with the Banda di Ruvo di Puglia, a wind-and-percussion ensemble that has appeared at major European jazz, classical and contemporary music festivals.

On record, Mazzone is credited on drums for Giorgio Gaslini's large-ensemble work Masks (1992, Soul Note), on the Italian Instabile Orchestra's live recording with Cecil Taylor, The Owner Of The River Bank (2003, Enja), and on the orchestra's 2008 live album of Anthony Braxton compositions, Creative Orchestra (Bolzano) 2007 (Rai Trade). He released a solo drums-and-percussion album, Ping Pong (1999, Leo Lab, recorded in Bari and produced by Leo Feigin), and a duo record with pianist Giuseppe Spagnoli, Impromptu Concert (2006, Splasc(H) Records). His earliest Discogs-documented recording is a 1990 septet date co-credited to Pino Minafra, Carlo Actis Dato, Antonello Salis, Bruno Tommaso, Lelio Giannetto, Mazzone and poet-saxophonist Vittorino Curci, Pino Minafra Et... Quella Sporca 1/2 Dozzina (Splasc(H) Records).

A full accounting of his 33 Discogs-logged release credits is maintained separately; see Full Discography below.

Mazzone's work sits in the free jazz and avant-garde jazz tradition that the Italian Instabile Orchestra came to represent internationally through the 1990s and 2000s, a large-ensemble idiom built on collective improvisation, extended technique and a deliberately unruly big-band sound rather than conventional swing-era charts. His percussion background outside jazz, including a classical-orchestra post at Teatro Petruzzelli and an ongoing conservatory teaching position, runs alongside that identity rather than competing with it: nearly the whole of his recorded output, from his earliest 1983 credit through his 2025 appearance on the Italian Instabile Orchestra's live Ellington tribute, is jazz or improvised-music repertoire. His own leader recordings, the solo Ping Pong and the duo Impromptu Concert, favor open, percussion-centered improvisation over composed material, consistent with his standing as, in regional press coverage, an "experimental drummer."