Rocco Ventrella was born in Bari, on Italy's Adriatic coast, on January 23, 1961. His father loved jazz and handed him a Duke Ellington record when he was a boy, and the alto saxophone sound of Johnny Hodges on it set the direction. He began on saxophone at about twelve. There was no saxophone diploma at the conservatory in those years, so at fifteen he moved to the clarinet, studied classical music, and put the saxophone aside for roughly seven years before coming back to it and to jazz, soul and funk. For more than two decades he played in a Bari big band, and the promotional biographies he has circulated name visiting soloists who worked with that band, among them Lee Konitz, Art Farmer, Dizzy Gillespie, Chet Baker, Enrico Rava and Paolo Fresu. On the 1998 CD Battisti Latino, a set of Lucio Battisti songs credited to the Banda Milord, he is the alto saxophonist, in a lineup that also includes the trombonist Gianluca Petrella and the trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso.

The turn that defined his career came in the mid-1990s, when he discovered Grover Washington Jr.. In 2005 Ventrella recorded, arranged and produced a short tribute disc, first issued on Roven Productions with three tracks and later extended to five: "Winelight," "Let It Flow," "Make Me a Memory," "Come Morning" and an original, "Mr. Grover." The band was Vito Di Modugno on bass, Alex Milella on guitar, Gino Palmisano on keyboards and Saverio Petruzzellis on drums. All About Jazz reviewed it in July 2005 and gave it five stars, and "Winelight" was picked by Jimi King of the internet station Sky.fm for his best-of-2005 selection. That exposure on internet smooth jazz stations brought him to the late American producer Bruce Nazarian, whose credits include work on Anita Baker's records, and to a long-distance partnership with the keyboardist Renato Falaschi.

The result was his first full album, Give Me the Groove (Smooth Sounds Music, 2007), produced by Nazarian and recorded in Los Angeles with Falaschi. Its tracks include "Soulful Strut," "Alleria," "On the Night," a reworking of "Feel Like Makin' Love," and his takes on "Winelight" and "A Night in Tunisia." The 2007 press release says five of its tracks placed in the top twenty on smooth jazz radio, and Jimi King ranked "Soulful Strut" number one in his 2006 year-end countdown. Ventrella has said the album was among about fifty entries considered in the Contemporary Jazz Album category at the 2008 Grammy Awards, a first-round listing and not a nomination; the category was won by Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters. He took the record to festivals abroad: the first Smooth Jazz Festival in Bregenz, Austria, on August 29 and 30, 2008, and the James Brown Music Festival in Augusta, Georgia, the same year, plus a January 2008 clinic at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Later festival dates listed in his biographies include Augsburg in Germany (with Gerald Albright and Jessy J), Mallorca in 2013 (with Rick Braun), the Lago Maggiore Smooth Jazz Festival in 2014 (on a bill with Keiko Matsui) and a guest appearance with Dave Koz at the Blue Note in Milan, along with club dates at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C.

His own releases then kept a steady pace. A single, "Where Were You" (2009), and "Secret Agent" (2010) came out on his own RV Music, and in 2013 the album Sweet Temptation appeared on Innervision Records, with Everette Harp on a version of Gershwin's "Summertime," guitarists Paul Brown and Nils, and drummers Gerry Brown and Sergio Bellotti; its title single had placed number 46 on a top 100 of 2012 compiled by the Groove Jazz Music site. Another Time (Delilah Records, 2015) followed. That year Jazztrax nominated him for Artist of the Year and invited him to the Catalina Jazztrax Festival, and his endorser biographies add that he received the site's Debut Artist award in October 2015. Keep In Touch (2018), which he largely played himself with the guitarist and drummer Michele Violante as co-producer, was followed by the EPs Colors (2019) and Reflections (2021), a run of digital singles, and the EP HE (April 15, 2025). He has also appeared on records by other Italian and European players, including the guitarist Roberto Tola's Colors (RT Music, 2020). The single "Frenetic Day," which he composed and plays on alto saxophone and keyboards, was released on August 16, 2024, and the most recent single of his own that is listed on streaming services is "Train Home" (April 17, 2026).

Ventrella has described himself as living only from music and, in a December 2022 interview, said he had stepped back from touring for the time being. He is listed as a saxophone teacher in the All About Jazz musicians directory and plays Yanagisawa saxophones with Beechler mouthpieces, Légère synthetic reeds and BG France accessories.

Ventrella works in the smooth jazz and contemporary jazz lane: melodic alto and soprano lines, R&B and funk grooves, programmed and live rhythm sections, and radio-length tracks. A 2007 press biography described his style as a bridge between late-1970s jazz fusion and mid-1980s jazz pop, and the line runs straight back to Grover Washington Jr., whose "Winelight" he made his first calling card. He names Washington, David Sanborn, Cannonball Adderley, Johnny Hodges and Maceo Parker as influences, and says the first jazz record he bought was the Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan meeting on Verve; the player he says he would most like to share a stage with is Bob James. He describes the saxophone as the instrument closest to the human voice and says tone is the first thing he listens for. His jazz-side substance is real but sits mainly in the smooth jazz and jazz-funk bracket, not the straight-ahead one, with his big-band years in Bari and a standard such as "A Night in Tunisia" as the grounding underneath. His recordings found their audience through internet smooth jazz radio, which is why most of his coverage comes from that scene.