Javier Edgardo Girotto was born in Córdoba, Argentina, on April 17, 1965, into a family where the instruments were already in the house. His maternal grandfather, A. L. Caroli, directed a marching band, played flugelhorn in a symphony orchestra and bandoneon in a tango orchestra, and took the boy to rehearsals. Girotto started on snare drum at eight, moved to the E flat clarinet in the Infanto Juvenil de Córdoba band and the band of Villa del Rosario, then to the B flat instrument, and from there to alto saxophone. He went to Buenos Aires looking for someone who could teach him jazz and found nobody, so he came home, started his own jazz-minded groups, and paid for them by working in the cuarteto dance bands that dominated provincial Argentine popular music. At sixteen he enrolled at the Conservatorio Provincial de Córdoba; there was no saxophone chair, so he took the clarinet and flute courses instead and completed the intermediate diploma in both. Alongside the conservatory he played in Vertiente, a mix of fusion and Argentine folk music, in Jazz 440, and in the quartets of Enzo Piccioni and Juan Ciallella.

At nineteen he won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music, which was also what got him the visa. He stayed four years and graduated in Professional Music cum magna laude, studying composition and arranging alongside saxophone and improvisation with Joseph Viola, George Garzone, Hal Crook and Jerry Bergonzi, and learning the working side of the job on bandstands with Danilo Pérez, Bob Moses and Herb Pomeroy. The pull toward Europe had been there before Boston: his first plan at sixteen had been to emigrate to France, where his friends had gone.

He arrived in Italy at twenty-five to settle family business in Puglia, which was also the route to the Italian citizenship he holds, and the visit turned permanent. In Rome he alternated commercial Latin work with jazz groups of his own. The first was Tercer Mundo, a Latin jazz sextet of piano, bass, percussion, drums, trumpet and saxophone that he built with the Cuban drummer Horacio "El Negro" Hernández. Next came Six Sax, a saxophone quartet with bass and drums: Rosario Giuliani and Tony Germani on alto, Gianni Savelli on tenor, Girotto on baritone, Marco Siniscalco on bass and Pietro Iodice on drums. Their album Homenaje, issued by Via Veneto Jazz in 1995 with Bob Mintzer and Randy Brecker as guests, was the first record with his name on it.

Aires Tango, the group he is still best known for, dates from 1994: Girotto on soprano and baritone, Alessandro Gwis on piano, Marco Siniscalco on bass and Michele Rabbia on drums and percussion. The band has run for more than thirty years and a dozen albums, from Malvinas (Equipe, 1996, taped in Rome on July 26 and 27, 1995) through Madres (1997), Poemas (recorded at Millesuoni Studio in Rome in January 1999), Cronologia del 900 (2000), Origenes (2001), the double live En Vivo (cut at Rome's La Palma Club on April 24, 25 and 26, 2002) and Escenas Argentinas (Rome, June 13 to 15, 2004) to Trentamila Cuori (2006), 10/15 (2009) and 30 (2024). Aniversario, recorded in Sofia on May 24, 25 and 26, 2002, set the quartet against the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra in arrangements by Paolo Silvestri. Duende, taped at the Artesuono studio near Udine on September 21, 22 and 23, 2015, added Ralph Towner as a full member rather than a guest: the odd-numbered pieces are Towner's and feature him, the even-numbered ones are Girotto's and are played by the quartet alone.

The rest of the catalogue is built out of small, specific formats. In 1999 he assembled Cordoba Reunion with three musicians from his own city, the pianist Gerardo Di Giusto, the percussionist Minino Garay and the bassist Carlos "El Tero" Buschini, to work through the milonga, chacarera, zamba and candombe rhythms that predate tango; their first album, recorded in September 2000 for Radio Svizzera Italiana and issued by Philology as Argentina Jazz, has Mercedes Sosa as guest singer. From 2000 he ran two duos at once. With the bandoneonist Daniele Di Bonaventura he made Visions, a programme of Enrico Rava compositions cut in a single day at Campiglione di Fermo on June 25, 2000, followed by Recordando Piazzolla (2002) and Recordando Gardel (2004), the latter with the Roma Sinfonietta under Fausto Anzelmo. With the accordionist Luciano Biondini he made El Cacerolazo (Fermo, March 8, 2002), Terra Madre for Enja (Spoleto, November 13 and 14, 2004) and Iguazù (2011), all of it original material and much freer in shape. A third duo, with the Argentine pianist Natalio Mangalavite, produced Colibrì in 2003 and then grew a third member: the singer Peppe Servillo joined for the G.S.M. Trio, whose records are L'amico di Córdoba (2003), Fútbol (2009), Parientes (2015) and L'anno che verrà (2021).

Two records put him in front of American rhythm sections. New York Sessions, taped at Sear Sound in New York on May 10 and 11, 2004 and released by CAM in 2006, is a quartet of Girotto's own compositions with Edward Simon on piano, Ben Street on bass and Jeff Ballard on drums. Sea Inside, recorded at the Hypnocampos studio in Naples between February 5 and 8, 2007 and issued by Itinera, is a genuinely co-led quartet billed to four names: Girotto, the Neapolitan pianist Francesco Nastro, the bassist Avishai Cohen and the drummer Roberto Gatto. Nastro wrote six of the nine pieces, including the opening "Song for Avishai"; Cohen contributed "Ann's Tune," Gatto "B Song" and Girotto the closing "El Pibe de Oro." Girotto plays soprano on seven tracks, baritone on one and the Andean moceño flute on Cohen's tune. He and Nastro carried the partnership on as a duo on Passione (CAM Jazz, 2012).

Alongside his own bands he has been one of the most-called reed players in Italian jazz. He held the horn chair in Roberto Gatto's groups across 7# (RCA Victor, 1997), Sing Sing Sing (1999) and Deep (2003); joined Enrico Rava's piano-less quartet, a Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan homage, for Full of Life (recorded November 11 and 12, 2002 with Ares Tavolazzi and Fabrizio Sferra); supplied what Rita Marcotulli has called the Argentine voice in her ensembles, from The Woman Next Door (recorded at the Studio Gil Evans in Amiens in 1997) through Koinè and Variazioni su tema; and took the baritone chair on Gianluca Petrella's debut X-Ray (September 2001). He is on Paolo Damiani's Al Tempo Che Farà, recorded at the Auditorium of Santa Cecilia in Perugia in February 2007 beside Gianluigi Trovesi, Danilo Rea and Bebo Ferra, and in the Giovanni Tommaso Quartet on Walking in My Shadow (2023). Since 2008 he has co-led Latin Mood with the trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso, a working quintet whose Sol appeared on Blue Note in 2009 and which was still recording in 2025. Big bands have used him as a soloist and composer: Argentina: Escenas en Big Band with the Parco della Musica Jazz Orchestra in 2007, in his own pieces arranged by Luigi Giannatempo, then a Dutch tour with the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw in December 2008 and a "jazz tango" project with the WDR Big Band in Cologne in August 2010 alongside Gary Burton and the bandoneonist Marcelo Nisinman.

He taught in the jazz department of the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome from 2009 to 2011, has given seminars at the conservatories of Pesaro, Lecce, Salerno, Como, Turin, Lima and Córdoba, and is on the faculty of the Saint Louis College of Music in Rome. In 2011 he started his own label, JG Records, with Alrededores de la Ausencia, recorded entirely in Argentina with Córdoba musicians he had known since before Berklee. From November 2016 he lost the use of his left hand to focal dystonia, the movement disorder that ends careers among wind and string players; he could not play properly for a year and a half and came back in May 2018, touring Argentina and Uruguay and cutting Tango Nuevo Revisited for ACT that September, a trio reading of Astor Piazzolla and Gerry Mulligan with Gianni Iorio on bandoneon and Alessandro Gwis on piano. The work since has kept the same shape: solo saxophone on Escenas en Solo, a duo with the accordionist Vince Abbracciante on Santuario (2021), and Colyseus with the Alma Saxophone Quartet in 2023.

Girotto is a specialist rather than a doubler, and he says so plainly: he plays soprano and baritone, sold his clarinet, and keeps the Andean flutes (quena, moceño, siku) as a third colour rather than a fourth instrument, because he wanted one recognisable voice instead of a wide range. The tone is dry and vocal, with a baritone that stays light and mobile in the register where most players get heavy, and a soprano that leans on the long declamatory line rather than on speed. He came to jazz through melody rather than harmony, by way of a record by the Italian altoist Massimo Urbani and then Bill Evans, and he did not seriously study the saxophone masters until he was twenty-four, which he regards as lucky because it left him nothing to imitate; the sound he admits to chasing is Jan Garbarek's. The other decisive figure is Piazzolla, whose bandoneon phrasing sits underneath the way Girotto shapes a melody. He has described improvising as an act of imitation of a singer, and specifically of a tango or folk singer, which explains why the solos on his own records tend to be long-breathed and rhetorical instead of harmonically busy. His relationship to Argentine material is not decorative and was not automatic: he told Jazz'halo that he came to detest folk music and tango while he lived among them, spent his Berklee years fully inside the American jazz language, and only found the Argentine repertoire again as nostalgia once he was in Europe, at which point he found the emotion that pure improvised music had not given him. Reviewing Duende for All About Jazz, Neri Pollastri drew the distinction the record itself is built on: Towner's pieces are lyrical and chiselled, Girotto's are more monolithic but intensely dramatic, carried by the pull of his own solos. Tango and Latin American folk forms are the largest single strand in his catalogue, through Aires Tango, Cordoba Reunion, the Di Bonaventura duo and the Piazzolla and Gardel projects, but they run in parallel with straight jazz work as a sideman rather than replacing it, and he has kept a foot in the classical repertoire too, improvising on Ravel and Debussy in duo with the concert pianist Michele Campanella.