Paolo Rustichelli was born in Rome in 1953, the son of the film composer Carlo Rustichelli. He grew up inside the Italian soundtrack business and was working with electric keyboards in his teens, mainly on film music: the Hammond organ, the Mellotron, and monophonic synthesizers such as the ARP 2600 and the Minimoog. By his own account he began at sixteen, working as a soundtrack composer and as a rock keyboard player at the same time, and he went on to score what he counts as more than a hundred theatrical and television projects, among them Mario Monicelli's Amici miei - Atto III.

His first album was Opera Prima (RCA Italiana, 1973), made with the drummer Carlo Bordini. Rustichelli sings and plays Hammond organ, Mellotron and piano on it, and it is filed with Italian progressive rock. It has been reissued many times, including in Japan in 2004 and by Sony in 2019. Through the 1980s he worked in television and pop: the 1983 single "Happy Train," a theme for the Italian TV show Domenica In, the soundtrack to the English-language film Double Exposure (1983), the TV-film score La bella Otero (1984), and a run of Italian dance and synth-pop productions, some under the pseudonym Jay Horus, for artists including Cicciolina and Moana Pozzi.

The jazz side of his career begins at his Midimovie Studio in Rome. According to the notes on the Discogs release, which cite Peter Losin's session discography, Miles Davis played the Palazzo della Civita in Rome on July 26, 1989 and during the same stay recorded seven tunes in Rustichelli's studio. Two of them, "Capri" and its reprise, anchor an album on which Rustichelli surrounded the trumpeter's playing with guests from jazz and rock. Discogs credits Wayne Shorter on soprano and tenor saxophones across four tracks, Herbie Hancock on grand piano on "Bold Man," Andy Summers on electric guitar on two tracks and Carlos Santana on electric guitar on "Full Moon," with Rustichelli on keyboards, Synclavier and vocoder and as producer. The album appeared in 1991 as Mystic Jazz on Polydor in Italy (the CD followed in 1992) and as Capri on Verve Forecast in the United States. Davis passed away in September 1991.

Rustichelli moved to Los Angeles in 1991. Santana had already recorded "Full Moon," which Rustichelli wrote, produced and played piano on, for Spirits Dancing in the Flesh (1990), and he later served as executive producer on Rustichelli's next album, Mystic Man (1996, Island and Guts & Grace Music). English Wikipedia and Rustichelli's own biography name Davis, Santana, Hancock, Shorter, Andy Summers and the singer Jill Jones among its contributors. The single "Paisa" reached the top ten of the Radio & Records Smooth Jazz/NAC airplay chart. In the same years he composed, arranged and produced Jill Jones's 12-inch "Bald" (Flying Records, 1993), and in 2002 he wrote and arranged "Kyrie" for Plácido Domingo's Sacred Songs (Deutsche Grammophon), playing piano, guitar and synthesizer on it.

In the 2000s and 2010s he worked mainly for the smooth jazz audience. Neopagan (Next Age Music, 2006) produced "My Geisha," a top-ten smooth jazz radio track in 2006 and 2007. "Med Groove" reached No. 1 on the smoothjazz.com chart and was the top-selling Amazon smooth jazz download for several weeks in January and February 2014; it appears on Soul Italiano (Next Age, 2016), and "Playa Blanca" and "Walking in Rome" came out as singles in 2014. A single called "Tempus Fugit" with the saxophonist Jessy J followed, which his biography dates to 2024 and describes as a No. 1 jazz seller on iTunes and Amazon Music.

The Miles Davis connection did not end with the original sessions. On Santana's Sentient (Candid, March 28, 2025), Rustichelli is credited as writer, arranger, producer and mixer of four tracks, "Get On," "Vers le Soleil," "Rastafario" and "Full Moon," each in a new Sentient version, with Davis's trumpet featured on "Get On" and "Rastafario." AllMusic also lists a 2026 soundtrack album by him, Black Tunnel, on the CAM Sugar label.

Rustichelli works alone where he can. He calls the method "One Man Plug Band": he plays every instrument himself and builds a track from the first note to the final mix, which suits a catalogue assembled around synthesizers, sequenced rhythm and layered keyboard textures rather than a live rhythm section. The sound is smooth jazz in its radio-friendly sense, with chill-out and new age coloring, a Mediterranean melodic habit from his film-music background, and a fusion edge when a guitarist or saxophonist is in the room. English Wikipedia files him under smooth jazz, jazz rock and progressive rock, and AllMusic lists his genres as jazz and classical.

The records that make the jazz-side case are the ones with other musicians on them: Davis, Shorter, Hancock, Summers and Santana on Mystic Jazz, and Santana's later records built around his arrangements. The larger part of his output is not jazz at all: Italian progressive rock, film and television scores, dance-pop productions and a classical-crossover piece for a tenor. He sits at the crossover end of the story, a keyboardist and producer who brought famous jazz and rock guests into a synthesizer-led Roman studio and then kept working in the smooth jazz format.