Giuseppe Francesco Servillo, known as Peppe, was born on October 15, 1960 in Arquata Scrivia, in the province of Alessandria, where his father had moved the family to manage a cement plant. The Servillos are from Caserta and returned there in November 1963. His brother is the actor Toni Servillo. Peppe is self-taught, and in 1980 he joined the Caserta band Piccola Orchestra Avion Travel, where he has been singer and frontman ever since.

Avion Travel is a pop and song band, and it is the part of his career that most Italians know. The group released Sorpassando in 1987, took the critics' prize at the 1998 Sanremo Festival and won the festival outright in 2000 with "Sentimento." Servillo has also written songs recorded by Fiorella Mannoia and Patty Pravo, scored the film L'uomo in piú (2001), and works steadily as an actor, with roles in John Turturro's Passione (2010) and the Manetti Bros.' Song'e Napule (2013). The band's bassist, Ferruccio Spinetti, is a jazz musician in his own right.

His jazz side began with guest spots. He is credited with a voice part on Roberto Gatto's 7# (RCA Victor, 1997), sings the bonus track "Roma nun fa' la stupida stasera" on Gatto's Plays Rugantino (CAM Jazz, 2000), a record that brings in Enrico Rava, Enrico Pieranunzi and Gianluca Petrella, and takes the vocal on "Dove sta Zazà" on Stefano Bollani's Abbassa la tua radio (Ermitage, 2001).

In 2003 he committed to it with a trio. After years of stage collaborations with the Argentine-born saxophonist Javier Girotto and the pianist Natalio Mangalavite, the three released L'amico di Cordoba (Il Manifesto, 2003), a program inspired by Piazzolla's tango, Jobim, jazz and the Italian canzone d'autore. The trio has continued under the billing Servillo, Girotto, Mangalavite with Fútbol (2009), a record of football-themed songs; Parientes (2015), which mixes Argentine tango standards with Italian songs; and L'anno che verrà (Barvin, 2021), a program of Lucio Dalla's songs with the arrangements split between Girotto and Mangalavite. The three also recorded "Felicità" for the 2013 compilation Dalla in Jazz (Okeh / Sony), and played the Jazzontheroad festival in Gussago on July 13, 2023.

The larger jazz project is Uomini in Frac, a concert homage to Domenico Modugno rearranged for jazz players, which Servillo has fronted since 2005. Italian Wikipedia names Danilo Rea, Furio Di Castri, Rita Marcotulli, Fabrizio Bosso, Girotto, Petrella, Mauro Negri, Cristiano Calcagnile, Gatto and Marco Tamburini among the jazz musicians involved, with Mimmo Epifani and Giovanni Lindo Ferretti as guests. The album Omaggio a Domenico Modugno (Casa del Jazz, CdJ3_10) was recorded at the Casa del Jazz in Rome on May 21, 2008, with Servillo singing ten Modugno songs, from "Selene" and "Lazzarella" to "Nel blu dipinto di blu (Volare)," beside Rea and Marcotulli on piano, Di Castri on bass, Calcagnile and Gatto on drums, Girotto on soprano and baritone saxophones, Bosso on trumpet, and his Avion Travel bandmates Fausto Mesolella on guitar and Mimì Ciaramella on percussion.

A core of that group became its own band: Bosso, Girotto, Marcotulli, Di Castri and the drummer Mattia Barbieri behind Servillo. Their first record was Memorie di Adriano - Canzoni del Clan Celentano (Pro Music Lab, 2012), a jazz reading of Adriano Celentano's repertoire, issued on CD and in a special edition with a DVD. By November 2018 the same quintet was touring a Lucio Battisti program, one stop being the Cinema Teatro Nuovo in Varese on November 10, 2018, billed as part of the JazzMi festival. It was recorded at the Casa del Jazz on April 22, 23 and 26, 2025 and released that year as Pensieri e parole - Canzoni di Lucio Battisti, with Girotto arranging.

Outside the jazz projects he has made three records of Neapolitan song with the Solis String Quartet, Spassiunatamente (2012), Presentimento (2016) and Carosonamente (2022, a program of Renato Carosone songs), sang "Il coraggio di ogni giorno" with Enzo Avitabile at Sanremo in 2018, and in September 2019 brought a band called Italian Portraits, with the drummer Enzo Zirilli, to the Folkclub in Turin. Apple Music files him under Crossover Jazz, and All About Jazz carries a musician page for him as a jazz vocalist.

Servillo is a singer-actor rather than a jazz improviser, and his jazz records are song-repertoire projects: he sings the original Italian melodies and lyrics in the phrasing of Italian pop and theatrical song, while the jazz players supply new harmony, solos and rhythm. The repertoire is the organizing idea each time, whether Modugno, Celentano's Clan, Battisti, Dalla, or the tango of Piazzolla. His pop side is stated plainly: Avion Travel, Sanremo, film acting and Neapolitan song are the larger part of his public career, and the jazz work sits beside them as a second, sustained line.

What ties the two together is the Italian songbook, treated seriously. His partners are some of Italy's best jazz instrumentalists, which gives the records a mainstream-jazz and chamber-jazz setting, with trumpet and soprano saxophone out front and piano, bass and drums underneath, rather than a studio-pop sound. The Argentine side of the trio with Girotto and Mangalavite, with its milonga and tango material, is a second influence that the records document in their track lists.