Raphael Gualazzi was born Raffaele Gualazzi in Urbino, in Italy's Marche region, on November 11, 1981. His father, Velio Gualazzi, was a co-founder of the band Anonima Sound with the singer-songwriter Ivan Graziani. By his own account he came to the piano as a boy after watching a film about Jerry Lee Lewis, and by about fifteen he was playing in a band with conservatory students, trying to mix styles with jazz among them. He studied piano at the Conservatorio Rossini in Pesaro, where the training was classical, and then went looking for the older roots: ragtime, stride and blues piano. The guitarist Jimmy Villotti pushed him toward the blues as the source of jazz, advice he has credited with leading to his first record. The names that recur in accounts of that period include Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Art Tatum and Mary Lou Williams, along with Ray Charles, Roosevelt Sykes and, among later acts, Stevie Wonder.

That first record was Love Outside the Window (2005), cut as a piano trio with Marco Ricci on double bass and Mauro Beggio on drums. Its fourteen tracks include "Georgia on My Mind," "Besame Mucho" and "Summertime" from Porgy and Bess, alongside pieces such as "Crazy Rag Blues." His "Georgia on My Mind" also appeared in 2008 on the French compilation Piano Jazz (Wagram). He played festivals in Italy and abroad, among them Fano Jazz by the Sea, Trasimeno Blues between 2007 and 2010, the Java festival in Jakarta and Ravello, and took part in a project called The History & Mystery of Jazz in Vermont and New Hampshire with Michael Ray, Steve Ferraris and John McKenna. In September 2009 he signed with Sugar after meeting its head, Caterina Caselli. His cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop," used in a television campaign for the energy company ENI, gave him his first wide audience, and a self-titled digital EP followed on September 28, 2010. He made his Blue Note Milan debut that September and played the Sunside club in Paris on December 1, 2010.

In February 2011 he won the Newcomers section of the Sanremo Festival with "Follia d'amore," which also took the critics' Mia Martini Award, and the next day he was chosen to represent Italy at the Eurovision Song Contest, the country's first entry since 1997. In Düsseldorf in May he performed a half-English version, "Madness of Love," and finished second with 189 points. The album behind the song, Reality and Fantasy (Sugar, February 16, 2011), was produced, composed and arranged by Gualazzi himself. It reached No. 4 in Italy and went platinum there. It features Fabrizio Bosso on trumpet, James Reynolds on harmonica and the British singer Rox on "Behind the Sunrise," and it closes its main program with a two-minute reading of Duke Ellington's "Caravan." DJ Gilles Peterson remixed the title song, which turned up on 2010 compilations including Hôtel Costes 14 and Nova Tunes 2.2.

Happy Mistake followed on February 14, 2013 (Sugar) and reached No. 5 in Italy. Bosso returned as a special guest, in a horn section with the tenor saxophonist Michele Polga and the trombonist Massimo Morganti on six of its tracks, and Vince Mendoza arranged and conducted two songs for the Metropole Orchestra. The album includes an improvisation on themes from Amarcord and guest vocals from Camille and the Puppini Sisters. At Sanremo in 2013 he placed fifth with "Sai (ci basta un sogno)," and in 2014 he took second place with "Liberi o no," a collaboration with the electronic act The Bloody Beetroots, released on the Accidentally on Purpose EP. The same year he wrote the score for Pupi Avati's film Un ragazzo d'oro, which brought a Nastro d'Argento nomination for best original score in 2015.

Love Life Peace (Sugar, 2016), produced by Matteo Buzzanca, again reached No. 4 in Italy and went gold. In 2016 he sang "The Bare Necessities" with Melody Gardot on the Verve compilation Jazz Loves Disney and became the Italian voice of the crab Tamatoa in Disney's Oceania, a role he repeated for the 2024 sequel. In August 2017 he served as musical director of the final night of the Notte della Taranta festival. Ho un piano (Sugar Music, February 7, 2020) moved toward pop, soul and electronic production under several producers, and he returned to Sanremo that month with "Carioca," finishing eleventh. A five-song EP of Fred Buscaglione songs, Buonasera, Fred!, appeared in 2021, and Bar del Sole (Sugar, June 10, 2022) reinterpreted ten Italian songs from the singer-songwriter tradition; its title honors the Urbino bar Caffè del Sole, where he first played in public. He appeared at the JazzMi festival in Milan in 2022. Dreams (CAM Sugar, October 6, 2023) is a fifteen-track album in Italian and English that its label describes as blending jazz with new soul, African funk, drum and bass and classical music. The three-track Dreams in Jazz (January 10, 2024) reworks pieces by three Italian film composers with jazz backgrounds: Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni and Armando Trovajoli. He has also written live harmonizations for silent short films for the Cineteca di Milano.

On stage he leads a group billed as the Raphael Gualazzi Quintet, booked at Blue Note Milano for November 20 to 22, 2026, with Mecco Guidi on keyboards, Luigi Faggi on trumpet, Anders Ulrich on bass, Gianluca Nanni on drums and Egidio Marchitelli on guitars.

Gualazzi is a songwriter first and a jazz pianist second, and the public record shows both. His biggest successes came from Sanremo and Eurovision, he writes concise pop songs in Italian and English, and several recent records, Ho un piano and Bar del Sole in particular, lean toward pop and song-book repertoire rather than improvisation. AllMusic calls him one of Italy's most accomplished jazz-blues musicians and files his style under crossover jazz, and the reason is his hands: a stride and ragtime left hand, blues phrasing and a New Orleans feel carried into three-minute songs, with a jazz rhythm section and horns when he can have them. He has described jazz as a kind of social metaphor, music that depends on listening to the player next to you. His other pole is the Italian song tradition, and the Buscaglione EP, the Italian-songbook album and the Dreams in Jazz tribute to Trovajoli, Piccioni and Umiliani show him moving between the two on purpose.