Gigi Venegoni (Luigi Venegoni) was born in Bergamo on August 9, 1951. He is a guitarist, composer and arranger whose name is attached to two things above all: he was a founder of the Turin band Arti & Mestieri in 1974, and in 1977 he started Venegoni & Co., an open-membership jazz-rock group that he has led ever since. His career also includes a long stretch of studio work and production, much of it on Italian dance records, so the progressive-rock and pop sides of his work are as real as the jazz-rock thread that runs through his own band.

Arti & Mestieri formed in Turin with six players: Venegoni on guitar, drummer Furio Chirico, bassist Marco Gallesi, keyboardist Beppe Crovella, violinist Giovanni Vigliar and Arturo Vitale on saxophones, clarinet and vibraphone. They played the Re Nudo festival at Milan's Parco Lambro in 1974 and signed to Cramps, the label run by Gianni Sassi. Their debut, Tilt (Immagini per un orecchio) (Cramps CRSLP 5501, 1974), credits Venegoni with guitar and synthesizer, the music and lyrics, and production alongside Paolo Tofani. Giro di valzer per domani (CRSLP 5502, 1975), which Italian Wikipedia describes as leaning harder into jazz-rock, again lists him on guitar and ARP synthesizer and as composer and producer. The band toured with Premiata Forneria Marconi, Gentle Giant and Area.

After a planned third album, Necropoli, was never made, Venegoni and Gallesi left, Gallesi to a group called Esagono and Venegoni to Venegoni & Co. The new band was deliberately loose: a rotating pool of musicians, about twenty over the years, free to bring their own ideas, with Venegoni's guitar in front. It played more than a hundred concerts. Rumore Rosso (Cramps CRSLP 5503, 1977), recorded at Studio G7 in Turin, is mostly his writing: he composed nine of the ten pieces, played guitar, bass and percussion, and produced with Gualtiero Gatto. Around him were Ludovico Einaudi and Luca Francesconi on electric piano, Pietro Pirelli on vibraphone, Claudio Pascoli on soprano saxophone and Maurizio Gianotti on tenor saxophone. Einaudi, who became one of Italy's best-known composers, started out as the band's keyboardist and stayed for its first two albums. Sarabanda (Cramps 5205 504, 1979) followed in a gatefold sleeve with four tracks. On June 14, 1979 the band played the Arena Civica in Milan at the concert held the day after the death of Demetrio Stratos, before a crowd Italian Wikipedia puts at seventy thousand, and its piece "Coesione" is on the live record Cramps issued from that night.

Through the 1980s Venegoni was as often behind the glass as in front of it. With keyboardist Marco Cimino he founded Mu Records, whose early releases include the Esagono album Vicolo (1978) and No Speed (1979) by the group Combojazz, which featured trumpeter Flavio Boltro; Venegoni engineered both and played guitar on two tracks of the second. He engineered and mixed Marco Bonino's Help Me To Hear (1981) and played on its opening track. From 1983 to 1986 his production, writing and arranging credits are mostly Italo-disco singles: The D. Light's Scratch Your Face (1983), Red Gang's "Fly to America" (1984), Mike Up's "Hollywood" (1986) and "Doctor Edison" (1984) by Limbo Koblaz, an alias Discogs lists for him. In 1985 he joined Chirico, percussionist Andrea Centazzo and saxophonist Carlo Actis Dato for the Edizioni Augusta LP L'Altro Lato, split between the Centazzo and Actis Dato pieces on one side and the Chirico and Venegoni pieces on the other, which Discogs files under fusion and free improvisation. Nocturne (Dynamo Sound Records, 1989), credited to Venegoni & Co., is a programmed, synthesizer-based record made with Cimino and the singer Marino Paire, with Venegoni on a Casio MIDI guitar; Discogs lists its styles as fusion and smooth jazz. Venegoni and Cimino also wrote the music for the Studio Aperto weather segment on Italia 1, used from 1991 to 2002.

The 1990s brought a reunion of Arti & Mestieri with five original members, Venegoni among them; in the early 2000s he stepped aside to work as a soloist, and in 2011 he came back for good. The Venegoni & Co. catalog was reissued and extended on Electromantic Music, the Turin label tied to his circle: Mosaico (2001), the live Rumore Rosso Vivo (2002), drawn from a 1978 concert at Turin's Palasport and a 1979 festival set at the Parco Ruffini, and Somewhere In The Seventies (Edel, 2003). His solo album Ante Tilt followed in 2006. Planetarium (Electromantic Music and Turin Jazz Rock School, TJRS&F002, 2007), which he produced, brings in pianist Piero Mortara, drummer Enzo Zirilli, bassist Alessandro Maiorino, saxophonist Diego Borotti and keyboardist Silvano Borgatta, with Chirico also on drums.

Canvas, a double CD released on November 3, 2017 under the Venegoni & Co. name, is the largest statement of his later years. Built with the producer and composer Francesco Sappino, it carries originals by Venegoni, Mortara and Sappino, three pieces by the Brazilian composer Egberto Gismonti and an arrangement of "Norwegian Wood," with the British pianist Jason Rebello at the piano. Back in Arti & Mestieri he recorded Universi paralleli (2015, released in Japan by King Records before Cramps and Sony issued it in Italy) and joined the band for concerts in Japan in 2011, in 2015 and at the Jazz Rock Legends event on May 18, 2019. That last appearance came under the name Essentia, a quintet project with Chirico, Mortara, violinist Lautaro Acosta and bassist Roberto Puggioni that Italian Wikipedia describes as the band's attempt to focus on its most jazz-leaning side. The concert was released as a two-CD and DVD set in 2020.

Venegoni is a guitarist first and a bandleader second, and what distinguishes his records is the guitar's place in a loose, collective setting: reviewers describe his playing as fluid and elegant, and the early Venegoni & Co. albums let woodwinds, vibraphone and electric piano trade the foreground with it. A review of Rumore Rosso calls it jazz-rock at its core, with passages of Italian progressive rock and Rock in Opposition, and compares its sequencing to Soft Machine. The later records widen the palette toward Brazilian and Mediterranean material, which is where the Gismonti pieces on Canvas come from.

The encyclopedic record files him under progressive rock first, and that is fair: Arti & Mestieri is generally treated as an Italian progressive band with strong jazz harmony, and his Italian Wikipedia entry lists the genres as jazz-rock and progressive rock in that order. His jazz-side work is concentrated in Venegoni & Co., in the 1985 improvisation session with Centazzo, Actis Dato and Chirico, and in the Essentia project. Separate from all of it is the Italo-disco and dance production of the 1980s, which has nothing to do with jazz and accounts for much of his credit list on Discogs.