Born in 1963, Maurizio was an amateur musician throughout his childhood and adolescence; he played drum kit, flute, quickly figured out the evolutionary advantages of learning how to sing and play a tune on guitar, and indulged his congenital obsession for percussion music by building his own instruments, collecting resonating object of any sort, and hitting pretty much anything that was catching his attention, while carrying his studies in architecture and interior design in his hometown Trieste, Italy.

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He turned full attention to music at 21, when he began studying conga drums with local teachers. By 1986 he had abandoned any other form of livelihood, and officially started his full-time career as a musician, playing for theatre, and local jazz, salsa and rock bands.
Between 1989 and 1991 he went through an intensive period of study of Congas and Afro Cuban Percussion, frequently visiting La Havana, Cuba, and learning from Tomàs “El Panga” Ramos, Changuito and Los Chinos, amongst others.

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He moved to London in 1991, where he quickly established himself as a session musician.
Quite an active presence in the British Funk scene throughout the nineties, he was the percussionist of Jamiroquai during their “Emergency” and “Space Cowboy” period, and of the James Taylor Quartet from 1994 to 1999; plus a number of less notorious acts with some of the most relevant artists involved in that scene, such as Dennis Rollins, Mike Smith's The Whole Thing, Jessica Lauren and many others.
During the same decade, in different stages, he was involved in most of the Salsa and Cuban related project to originate from London. His collaborations in that field include, amongst others, Jesus Alemani, Snowboy, Alex Wilson, Tumbaito, Herman Oliveira.

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With drummer Davide Giovannini he co-founded the duo Afroshock, whose activity spanned from 1989 to 2000. Afroshock released only one album, in 1998: “Accommodating Gods”, a creative tribute to the music of Cuban Santeria, still talked about as one of the most important works for percussion music to come out of the UK in the nineties.

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In 2000, during a period of long and frequent sojourns in native Italy, Maurizio joined Ezzthetic, a community of visual artists, actors, djs, musicians and artists from other disciplines based in Northern-East Italy, with whom he collaborated on a number of productions in the fields of visual and installation art, theatre and cinema.

Among the many productions, most of which were one-off stage actions, limited edition music collectables and site-specific performances, one commercially available CD, called simply “ezzthetic_ep”, was released in the in UK with the F-IRE Label. After the release of the EP, with an abrupt braking, Ezzthetic ceased its activities as a collective.

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After this experience, back as a full-time Londoner and eager to pursue the paths of research and experimentation opened during the Ezzthetic years, Maurizio started a collaboration with the tuba player Oren Marshall, and began developing a personal approach to improvised music.
During the same period he started working with the electronic musician Sam Britton (aka Isambard Khroustaliov), from the laptop duo Icarus. Isambard and Maurizio's first album “Five Loose Plans” was released in 2006 with the label Not Applicable, and marked the beginning of a friendship and artistic partnership which was to give many fruits, and still continues fertile to these days. Together with other discographic collaborations of Sam and Ollie Bown, the other half of Icarus, Five Loose Plans contributed in enlarging the catalogue and broadening the scopes of the label, originally intended solely as an independent outlet for the Icarus recordings.
Not Applicable eventually consolidated into a team of like minded video and music artists, which toured UK and Europe in 2006 as The Not Applicable Artists Project and started, in 2007, a series of regular evenings of music in London, called Appliances. Many of the performances recorded during the Appliances nights have been included in the mammoth-size release “An Introduction to Not Applicable” (2008), which is freely downloadable from the Not Applicable website.
The first and only album of the Oren Marshall / Maurizio Ravalico duo, "In Thunder Rise", was released in October 2010 with the Not Applicable label.

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Maurizio's other collaborations over the years include Paul McCartney, Paul Young, Greg Osby, Kaidi Tatham, Dego McFarland, Finn Peters, Barak Schmool, John Edwards, Steve Beresford, Pat Thomas, Shabaka Huchkins, Andrea Parkins, Eska Mtungwazi, Fred thomas.
He was the conga player of the Dele Sosimi's Afrobeat Ensemble for over ten years, collaboration which granted him, amongst other things, the congas chair at the European runs of Fela!, the Broadway show about the life and music of Fela Kuti. This also led to the formation of The Fontanelles, offspring of the Fela! musical house band, whose debut album Horns of Freedom was released in November 2013.
For several years he's been playing percussion in many contemporary dance schools around London, and developed an articulated relation, both intuitive and pragmatic, with the discipline of dance. He has since then, collaborated with the choreographers Lea Anderson, Bill T.Jones, Maja Garcìa, Jane Turner and Laura SImi.

 

Since 2010 he's been making Berlin his second home, were he frequently performs solo and with many of the city's improv scene musicians.

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One of his more recent projects is the trio Fiium Shaarrk, with Isambard Khroustaliov and the Berlin-based drummer Rudi Fischerlehner. Fiium Shaarrk's debut album No Fiction Now! was released in November 2012, while their latest We Are Astonishingly Lifelike came out in March 2017.
We Are Astonishingly Lifelike was included in Gilles Peterson’s 50 Essential Jazz and Beyond Records of 2017, and was voted one of the 12 best albums of 2017 by BBC3 Late Junction.

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Maurizio is a close collaborator of Tamar Osborn's 5-piece modal jazz ensemble Collocutor (Top 50 Jazz Albums of All Times on MusikExpress.de), a regular member of Phil Dawson’s Quintet, Loz Speyer’s Timezone, Noga Ritter’s band, the pop band Attawalpa, and he also collaborates with the extended string quartet Phaedra Ensemble.

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Maurizio runs a solo percussion project, which he's been presenting live in venues and festival across Germany, UK and Italy. His solo album Nobody's Husband, Nobody's Dad was released in November 2018 with the London based label Funkiwala, quickly following its companion release A Momentary Convergence of Differently Paced Trajectories, an EP of percussion-heavy remixes of tracks by Fiium Shaarrk, Collocutor and from the aforementioned album.

 

Covid-stricken 2020 was a year busy with residences around France, with Laura SImi and the Normandy-based dance company Silenda, with whom he created The Loud Atlas, a one-hour long piece for one dancer and one percussionist, which debuted in Paris in September 2021.

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