Richard Galliano is a Franco-Italian accordionist. He was born in December 1950 in Le Cannet in the very south of France, near Nice. At the age of four he started playing piano and accordion, following his Italian father Lucien. Galliano has played with the most famous international artists and jazzmen including Ron Carter, Chet Baker, Jan Garbarek, Michel Petrucciani, Michel Portal, Toots Thielemans, and Claude Nougaro. In 1983 Astor Piazzolla invited Galliano to be the bandoneon soloist at the Comédie Française in his incidental music for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. This marked the beginning of a friendship between the two that lasted until Piazzolla's death in 1992.
