Richard Galliano was born December 12, 1950, in Cannes, France, to a family of Italian heritage. His father, Luciano Galliano, was an accordionist who had emigrated from Italy and settled in Nice, and it was Luciano who put the instrument in his son's hands at age four. As a teenager Galliano broadened his formal training considerably, studying trombone, harmony, and counterpoint at the Nice Conservatoire (the Academy of Music in Nice) alongside his accordion lessons — a classical grounding that would later let him move fluently between jazz, tango, and orchestral writing.

At fourteen, searching for ways to push the accordion beyond its traditional French repertoire, Galliano discovered jazz through recordings of trumpeter Clifford Brown. "I copied all the choruses of Clifford Brown," he later said, "impressed by his tone and his drive, his way of phrasing over the thunderous playing of Max Roach." It was a formative realization: the accordion, at the time, had essentially no presence in jazz at all, and the idea of building one took hold early. In 1966 and 1967 he won first prize at the World Accordion Cup competition in both Spain and France; in the Spanish round, the mandatory piece was a "Chaconne" written by the Israeli accordionist Yehuda Oppenheimer, and the two musicians stayed in touch as friends and occasional collaborators until Oppenheimer's death in 2012.

Galliano moved to Paris in 1973. He soon became a key member of chanson star Claude Nougaro's band, working as both pianist and accordionist through a run of live recordings between 1977 and 1983, and built a reputation as an in-demand session and touring musician across French popular music — appearing over the following decades on records by Charles Aznavour, Juliette Gréco, Francis Cabrel, and dozens of others, alongside jazz and improvised-music dates with Michel Portal, Enrico Rava, Chet Baker, and Anouar Brahem. In 1983 he met the Argentine bandoneon master Astor Piazzolla, the architect of tango nuevo, and the two developed a friendship and mutual respect that would redirect Galliano's career. In 1991, on Piazzolla's direct advice, Galliano returned to the traditional French repertoire he had grown up with — waltzes, javas, tangos, and ballads — and began opening it to jazz improvisation, doing for musette roughly what Piazzolla had done for Argentine tango a generation earlier. The Académie du Jazz recognized the new direction in 1993 with the Prix Django Reinhardt, awarded to the French jazz musician of the year.

The high-water mark of that reinvention came in 1996, when Galliano crossed the Atlantic to record New York Tango at Clinton Recording Studios with bassist George Mraz, drummer Al Foster — whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — and guitarist Biréli Lagrène. The album won Galliano the Victoire de la Musique Jazz, France's top jazz honor, in 1997; he won it again the following year for Blow Up, a duo record with Michel Portal. Those two prizes, a decade after Piazzolla's advice sent him back to his roots, marked the point at which Galliano was fully established as the accordion's leading ambassador in modern jazz.

In the 2000s Galliano formed the trio that would become his longest-running and most celebrated jazz project: Mare Nostrum, with Swedish pianist Jan Lundgren — whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile — and Sardinian trumpeter Paolo Fresu. The group's name, Latin for "our sea," reflected its guiding idea of a shared Mediterranean musical language distributed across three home countries. The debut Mare Nostrum appeared in 2007 on the German label ACT, followed by Mare Nostrum II in 2016, Mare Nostrum III in 2019, and — after sessions recorded in France in the fall of 2024 — Mare Nostrum IV in March 2025, giving the trio an active recording life spanning nearly two decades.

Around the same time, Galliano opened an entirely different chapter by signing to Deutsche Grammophon, becoming, by his own label's account, the only accordionist ever to record for the storied classical imprint. The result was a run of composer-focused albums recast for accordion and small ensemble: Bach (2010), recorded at Notre-Dame-du-Liban in Paris; Nino Rota (2011), made for the film composer's centenary with a jazz quintet including saxophonist John Surman and trumpeter Dave Douglas; Vivaldi (2013), a reworking of The Four Seasons for accordion and string quartet; and Mozart (2016). Across a recording career now spanning more than six decades, Galliano has released over 70 albums under his own name — solo, duo, trio, and orchestral — on labels including Dreyfus, ACT, Milan, CAM Jazz, Resonance, and Deutsche Grammophon, and has appeared as a collaborator with an extraordinarily wide range of artists, from Ron Carter and Wynton Marsalis to Toots Thielemans and Charles Aznavour. In a further honor unusual even by jazz standards, the asteroid 121022 Galliano was named for him.

Galliano's playing rests on two poles that rarely meet in one musician: a classical training rigorous enough to carry Bach and Vivaldi on solo accordion, and a jazz vocabulary built from transcribing Clifford Brown's bebop lines note for note as a teenager. What made him a historic figure rather than simply a virtuoso was the 1991 decision, urged on by Astor Piazzolla, to stop treating French musette as a closed folk tradition and instead open it to improvisation, extended harmony, and swing — the same move Piazzolla had made with Argentine tango decades earlier. The result is a sound that moves comfortably between smoky Parisian waltz, New York-style tango-jazz, and Mediterranean lyricism with Fresu and Lundgren, without ever losing the specific vocabulary — musette's rolling left-hand bass, the bandoneon's breath-like phrasing — that keeps his playing recognizably his own even inside a classical concerto.