Pippo Starnazza was born Luigi Redaelli in Milan on April 16, 1909, and made his name as a Milan jazz drummer who turned comic singer and, later, film character actor. Italian accounts say he gave up the violin for the drums as a boy after hearing an American jazz band in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, and a 2024 history of the Milan scene names Arturo Agazzi, the club owner and bandleader known as Mirador, as the influence that turned him toward jazz. In the 1920s he was playing drums with the De Carli orchestra at the Orfeo music hall. From 1927 he worked in Piero Rizza's Louisiana Band, and he went on to play with most of the leading jazz orchestras in Milan, among them the Jazz Band Ernesto Marchi and, from 1929, Nanni DalDello's Hot Pickers, where his section-mates included Robert De Kers, Beppe Mojetta and Marino Marzaroli.

With the trombonist Mojetta he formed a duo in which he began to sing. The pair took American standards such as "Dinah," "Sweet Sue," "St. Louis Blues" and "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" and delivered them in a mock-English made of Milanese-accented gibberish, which became his trademark and earned his first records as a singer, issued by Odeon. In 1934 he joined the orchestra of Gorni Kramer and later that of Pippo Barzizza, while also working as a solo singer of comic Milanese versions of American songs.

Around 1939 and 1940 he took the stage name Pippo Starnazza and formed the Quintetto del Delirio, a group that, despite its name, was an eleven-piece band. Its reeds and accordion were played by Franco Mojoli, with Pietro Di Salvatore and Astore Pittana on trumpet, Clinio Bergamini on trombone, Piero Cottiglieri on tenor saxophone, Enzo Ceragioli on piano, Angelo Servida on guitar, Quirino Spinetti on vibraphone, Sergio Almangano on violin and Adriano Almangano on bass, with Starnazza on drums and vocals. Its Odeon 78s of 1941 to 1943 include "Come ti chiami?" (P. 573, 1941), written by Cosimo Di Ceglie and Gian Carlo Testoni, and "Io cerco la Titina" (1942), taken from the film Noi vivi. The band also accompanied other singers on record, among them Carlastella, Rudy Solinas, Enza Passatore and Otello "Canapino" Canapa. Italian histories credit him as the first singer in Italy to use a scat style, and he picked up the nickname Squà-Squà, which is why some discs are billed to Pippo Starnazza and his Squà Men. His stage act leaned on rubbery facial expressions and a bass drum painted with a comic portrait and the badge of Inter.

The jazz historians took notice of him. His Squà Men are heard on "Oh Bimba" on 40 anni di jazz in Italia, a two-LP survey of Italian jazz issued by Ricordi in 1963 and curated by Adriano Mazzoletti. A 1995 compilation of Milan recordings from 1941 to 1943, Jazz in Italy Under the Fascism, credits him on drums with I Maestri del Ritmo, and a 2010 CD on the same label, Jazz in Italy in the 40's, gathers 26 recordings by the Quintetto del Delirio and Starnazza. He kept recording for lighter markets through the next decades, for Durium in 1953, Odeon, Embassy and Combo in the late 1950s, Bluebell in 1960, CGD in 1965 and North in 1966, the last of these a version of "Dinah," the standard he had sung in the 1930s.

As his music career declined he moved into acting in the early 1960s and worked steadily as a supporting and character player. His credits include Mario Monicelli's I compagni (1963), Carlo Lizzani's La vita agra (1964), Monicelli's L'armata Brancaleone (1966), Ettore Scola's Il commissario Pepe (1969), Vittorio De Sica's I girasoli (1970), Monicelli's Romanzo popolare (1974) and, in 1975, Adriano Celentano's Yuppi du. Starnazza passed away in Milan on July 16, 1975, of cardiac arrest, at the age of 66. The drummer and comedian Gegè Di Giacomo later cited him as an inspiration, and the Skiantos singer Freak Antoni paid tribute by fronting a side project called Beppe Starnazza e i Vortici, in which he presented himself as Pippo's fictional son.

Starnazza worked at the border where Italian jazz met comic song. His drumming came from the Milanese dance-orchestra tradition of the 1920s and 1930s, and his jazz singing was a parody of English: swing standards sung in a made-up, Milanese-flavored mock-English, with nonsense syllables and scat-like phrasing that Italian sources treat as a first in the country. It is better described as a hot-dance comedy act than as improvised jazz singing, and his later fame rests on character acting rather than on jazz performance, which is why his place here is that of a crossover figure. Arturo Agazzi and the American bands that brought jazz to Milan shaped him, and the big-band and hot-dance orchestras of Kramer and Barzizza were his training ground. Later entertainers, notably Gegè Di Giacomo and Freak Antoni, cited him as a model for the clowning drummer-singer.