Born to a family of musicians, Barbieri began playing music after hearing Charlie Parker 's "Now's the Time." He played the clarinet,then the alto saxophone while performing with the Argentine pianist Lalo Staffroom in the late 1950s. By the early 1960s, while inRome, he was playing the tenor saxophone, and also worked with the trumpeter Don Cherry. By now influenced by John Coltrane's late recordings, as well as those from other ' Free jazz'' saxophonists such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, the warm and gritty tone, which would become his trademark sound, began to develop. In the late 1960s, he was fusing musics from South America into his playing and contributed to multi-artist projects like C harlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra and Carla Bley's Escalator Over The Hill . His score for Bernardo Bertolucci's film Last Tango in Paris earned him a Grammy Award and led to a record deal with Impulse! Records.
By the late 1970s he was working for A&M Records and moved his music towards jazz-pop with albums like Caliente (with his best known song, Carlos Santana's Europa).
Though he continued to record and perform into the 1980s, the death of his wife Michelle led him to withdraw from the public arena. He returned to recording and performing in the late 1990s, playing music that would fall into the arena of smooth jazz.
Nancy Savoca and her husband, Rich Guay, are working on a documentary of Barbieri's life and work.
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