Jimmy Villotti was born Marco Villotti on February 14, 1944, in Budrio, near Bologna, and grew up in the city, where he studied piano and guitar as a child. In a 2020 interview with Avvenire he named the clarinettist Henghel Gualdi as his early mentor. He took the stage name Jimmy and kept it for the rest of his career.

His professional start was in the beat boom. In 1963 he joined the Meteors, who recorded two LPs for RCA Italiana and toured behind Gianni Morandi, and he went on to other beat groups, among them I Baci of Forlì. In the 1970s he formed the progressive rock group Jimmy M.E.C. with Fio Zanotti, which put out a single on Fonit Cetra, and he worked as a session guitarist for Augusto Martelli and Andrea Mingardi. He played guitar on Lucio Dalla's Come è profondo il mare (RCA, 1977). In 1978 he composed the rock opera Giulio Cesare, issued on the Centotre label and scored for singers, chorus and a thirty-piece orchestra, and in 1980 he produced the Skiantos album Pesissimo!.

The 1980s were his busiest years as a song-world guitarist. He is credited on Francesco Guccini's Metropolis (1981), and Wikipedia lists a long run of work with Claudio Lolli, Sergio Endrigo, Ornella Vanoni, Luca Carboni, Stadio and Ron. From 1981 he played guitar for Paolo Conte: Discogs credits him on Paris Milonga (1981), Appunti di viaggio (1982), Concerti (1985) and Aguaplano (1987). Conte dedicated the song "Jimmy, ballando" to him and introduced it at a 1988 concert in Lugano. In 1990 he played on the debut album of Vinicio Capossela, All'una e trentacinque circa, on which the saxophonist Antonio Marangolo also plays.

The jazz thread ran alongside all of this. His solo album after the rock opera, Jimtonic (Assist, 1984), is a guitar-and-vocals date with Marangolo on saxophone and Guido Guidoboni on trumpet, which Discogs files under jazz, rock and pop. In 1989 he played guitar on Gualdi's Nel cuore della musica (Fonit Cetra). Italian Wikipedia says that after years as a session musician he gave himself over to jazz and practiced daily. His 1993 album Jimmy Villotti (Mercury) mixed jazz with easy-listening pop and ironic, partly autobiographical lyrics that he sang himself. Si fidi ci ho il fez (1995), Solo difficoltà, nessun dubbio (CGD East West, 1997, with Sisar Ruby), Rigorosamente grezzo (1999) and Naturalmente imperfetto (NuN Entertainment, 2003) followed, moving further toward a casual, song-led style.

From the early 2000s the jazz records are the clearest part of the record. He played guitar on the jazz singer Nicola Arigliano's live album My Name Is Pasquale!, recorded at the Teatro Fiamma in Terni on October 26, 2002, in a band with Maurizio Giammarco on saxophone, Roy Paci and Tom Kirkpatrick on trumpets, Antonello Vannucchi on piano and Giampaolo Ascolese on drums. Live in Cantina Bentivoglio (Azzurra Music, 2003) paired him with the pianist Massimo Faraò and two American rhythm-section veterans, the bassist Wayne Dockery and the drummer Bobby Durham, and the same group, with the saxophonist Red Holloway added, recorded Just Swing, What Else? (Azzurra Music, 2004). In 2006 he was the guitarist and a vocalist on the Blue Midnight Orchestra's swing-era Live in Cantina Bentivoglio. For more than twenty years he was artistic director of Selva in Jazz, the summer jazz and swing festival in Selva Malvezzi, a village in Molinella, and on June 5, 2022, he led a quintet in Bologna's Piazza San Francesco through a program running from swing and bebop to later styles. In 2008 the Club Tenco in Sanremo gave him its "I suoni della canzone" award, which honors musicians who have worked with major songwriters.

He was also a writer, with the books Gli sbudellati (1994), Oringhen (2000), La penultima donna (2003), Va' con Dio (2006) and Onyricana (2019), the last drawn from his dreams. He kept working until the end: on November 6, 2023, he took part in the opening date of Capossela's tour. Jimmy Villotti passed away in Bologna on December 6, 2023, at the age of 79, after a long illness. His funeral was held on December 9 at the Antoniano in Bologna. A posthumous Universal compilation drawing mostly on his 1990s albums was issued in 2024.

Italian press coverage described Villotti as a swing and bebop guitarist, praising a lyrical, acoustic sound and a way of avoiding virtuoso display. Wikipedia names his jazz influences as the saxophonists Steve Grossman and George Coleman, the guitarists Tony Castellano and Al Bacon, and the Belgian guitarist René Thomas. His own records are less strictly jazz than his reputation: the songs on his 1990s albums are ironic, melodic and often sung in his own voice, with jazz harmony underneath rather than at the front.

The profile is a split one and is best read that way. By volume his career was in Italian song, as guitarist for Paolo Conte, Lucio Dalla, Francesco Guccini, Gianni Morandi and Vinicio Capossela, and he said as much in the 2020 interview, calling his range across pop, jazz and rock both his strength and his main regret and saying he preferred not to be called a jazz musician. The jazz side is nonetheless documented in records with Nicola Arigliano, Massimo Faraò, Red Holloway and the Blue Midnight Orchestra, in more than twenty years running a jazz festival, and in his own bebop-and-swing concerts. The pianist Raphael Gualazzi has credited Villotti with steering him toward the blues as the root of jazz.