Lelio Luttazzi was born in Trieste on April 27, 1923. His father, Mario, died of tuberculosis when Lelio was three, and his mother, Sidonia Semani, an elementary schoolteacher, raised him in the village of Prosecco above the city, where he was the only Italian speaker in a class of Slovene children. The village priest gave him his first piano lessons, and he went on to the Petrarca high school in Trieste.

During the Second World War he enrolled in law at the University of Trieste, passed two exams, and drifted into music instead, playing piano at Radio Trieste and writing his first songs. In 1943 he conducted a student band at the Teatro Politeama to open a concert by the singer Ernesto Bonino, who asked him for a song afterward. The result, "Il giovanotto matto," was recorded by Bonino that year and became a hit. When the war ended, the royalty statement from the Italian authors' society showed 350,000 lire, enough to persuade him to turn professional. In 1948 he moved to Milan to work as artistic director at CGD, the record company founded by his fellow Triestine Teddy Reno, and wrote "Muleta mia" for Reno that year. Several of the CGD 78s of 1948 to 1950 are billed to Luttazzi's own small ensembles, among them "Troppo tardi" and "Benvenuto, Mister Swing," issued in 1948 with Reno singing.

In 1950 he took charge of a RAI orchestra in Turin, where, according to Italian Wikipedia, he built the first rhythmic string orchestra in Italy. In 1954 he moved to Rome to lead one of RAI's light-music orchestras on variety programs. His debut as a television conductor came in 1955 on the weekly show Musica in vacanza, beside Gorni Kramer, and in the 1956 to 1957 season he led the orchestra on the radio variety Rosso e nero. English Wikipedia credits him as one of the first composers to put jazz structures into Italian songs, and Italian Wikipedia describes the songs he wrote in the 1950s as jazz-flavored and full of swing, played by him at the piano and sung in a very personal style. "Chiedimi tutto," "Legata a uno scoglio," "Rabarbaro blues," "Senza cerini" and "Timido twist" are among the best known. For other singers he wrote "Una zebra a pois" (Mina), "Vecchia America" (Quartetto Cetra) and "Eccezionalmente sì" (Jula De Palma), and he scored films, among them the Totò comedies Totò lascia o raddoppia? and Totò, Peppino e la... malafemmina (both 1956) and Dino Risi's Venezia, la luna e tu (1958).

His own jazz piano records come from the same years. Columbia issued Ballate con Lelio Luttazzi in 1956 and In penombra, twelve Gershwin, Rodgers and Kern songs with Luttazzi the only musician credited, on piano, with a back sleeve dated August 1958, along with 7 inch EPs devoted to Rodgers and to Gershwin. Scherzandoci sopra (1958) swings themes from Mozart and from operetta. A 1955 CGD ten-inch album of standards is billed jointly to Luttazzi and the arranger Gianni Ferrio. In 1961 came Lelio Luttazzi presenta 30 anni di swing, a seven-piece band date with Baldo Maestri on clarinet and alto saxophone, Bill Gilmore on trumpet and trombone, Franco Chiari on vibraphone, Libero Tosoni on guitar, Luigi Simeone on bass and Pierino Munari on drums, with tracks titled as tributes to Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt and Count Basie.

His career as a presenter began in 1962 with Il paroliere questo sconosciuto, where a very young Raffaella Carrà worked beside him, and peaked with Studio Uno (1965 to 1966), on which he appeared with Mina, and with the radio chart show Hit Parade, which he hosted from January 6, 1967. In May 1970, at the height of his fame, he was arrested with the actor Walter Chiari on drug charges, after passing on a phone message from Chiari to a man who turned out to be a dealer. He spent 27 days in jail before being released and cleared without a trial. Renzo Arbore and then Giancarlo Guardabassi hosted Hit Parade in his absence; Luttazzi returned to the program on February 26, 1971 and stayed until its last broadcast on December 31, 1976. The episode led to a memoir, Operazione Montecristo, and to his only film as director, L'illazione (1972), and Italian Wikipedia says it gave Alberto Sordi the idea for Detenuto in attesa di giudizio.

The piano never stopped. We Love Lelio Luttazzi, on Vedette, is a jazz piano album with "Desafinado," "Star Dust," "Basin Street Blues," "Old Man River," "The Girl from Ipanema" and a "Boogie per tre." I miei stati d'animo (E.M.R., 1971) is an instrumental record of short pieces whose titles include "Beat blues mosso" and a tribute, "Ciao Errol Garner!" In 1981 he recorded 30 motivi 30... ti ricordi? as the Lelio Luttazzi Trio, with Giorgio Rosciglione on bass and Roberto Podio on drums: three long piano fantasies, one on his own songs, one on Kramer's and one on other writers'. After a run of jazz concerts in Italy he received the "Una vita per il jazz" prize from the Brass Group of Trapani in 1992, and then withdrew from public life.

From the 2000s he came back in small steps. RAI archive material from his orchestra years appeared as Artistry in RAI (2005). On February 19, 2009 he collected a music prize at the Sanremo festival and accompanied the singer Arisa at the piano on "Sincerità." His last concert, with his sextet, took place on August 15, 2009 in Piazza Unità d'Italia in Trieste, during the Trieste Loves Jazz festival, and was released as Live in Trieste with Gershwin and Cole Porter medleys, "Hello Dolly," "Indiana," "Basin Street Blues" and a Gorni Kramer medley. He passed away at home in Trieste on the night of July 8, 2010, at 87, after a peripheral neuropathy that had worsened over the preceding three months. His ashes were scattered in the Gulf of Trieste from his boat, Oblomov.

A foundation in his name was set up on October 22, 2010, and Pupi Avati's documentary Lelio Luttazzi, il giovanotto matto aired on Rai 5 on October 30, 2011. The 2013 tribute album Per pianoforte e amici gave his songs to a long list of Italian jazz pianists, among them Stefano Bollani, Rita Marcotulli and Danilo Rea as a duo, Renato Sellani, Dado Moroni, Franco D'Andrea, Enrico Intra and Seby Burgio. In 2013 Simona Molinari recorded the last two songs he left unpublished, "Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde" and "Buonanotte Rossana." The Premio Lelio Luttazzi, a national competition for jazz pianists aged 16 to 30, carries his name, and events marking the centenary of his birth ran in 2023 and 2024.

In Italy Luttazzi is remembered first as a television and radio host and as a songwriter, and that is stated here plainly: most of his public career was variety shows, film scores and popular songs, and his best-known work, Hit Parade, was a chart program. Jazz was his working language inside all of it. English Wikipedia credits him as one of the first Italian composers to bring jazz structures into songs, and his records ground that claim in repertoire: Gershwin, Rodgers and Kern ballads, standards such as "Indiana," "How High the Moon," "Laura" and "I Can't Get Started," and blues and boogie titles, with tracks named as homages to Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt, Count Basie and Erroll Garner. The idiom the records document is swing-era and songbook piano, and he sang his own songs at the same keyboard in what Italian Wikipedia calls a very personal style.