Sergio Cammariere was born in Crotone, in Calabria, on November 15, 1960, and plays piano and sings his own songs. He left the south as a young man and made his first living in Florence, where, by his own account in a 2021 interview, he worked as a bartender, an insurance courier and a goldsmith's assistant before music could pay the bills. Rome later became his base. His clearest jazz reference point is a fellow native of Crotone, the guitarist and banjoist Lino Patruno, whom he calls a father figure. When Patruno's band played the Teatro Apollo in Crotone in 1983, Cammariere sat in and improvised on two blues, in a group that included trombonist Marcello Rosa.

His first professional work was for the screen. In 1992 he wrote the score for Pino Quartullo's film Quando eravamo repressi, followed by music for Claudio Fragasso's Teste rasate (1994) and Angelo Longoni's Uomini senza donne (1996). In 1993 he made I ricordi e le persone, billed as Kunstler, Cammariere & Stress Band and produced by Vincenzo Micocci, the first record with the poet and lyricist Roberto Kunstler, who has written most of his words ever since. At the 1997 Premio Tenco review he won the IMAIE prize for best musician and interpreter, and in 1998 he released the EP Tempo perduto.

His debut under his own name, Dalla pace del mare lontano, came out on August 20, 2001 on the jazz label Via Veneto Jazz (VVJ 033), produced by Biagio Pagano. It was recorded in direct takes with his working trio of bassist Luca Bulgarelli and drummer Amedeo Ariano, plus trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso, violinist Olen Cesari, percussionist Simone Haggiag and guitarist Alex Britti. Apart from an Italian lyric by Pasquale Panella for Charles Trenet's "La mer" (as "Il mare"), it is original material. A review in Jazzitalia at the time heard tango, beguine, samba, swing and blues rhythms, modal harmony and a passage in 5/4. The record won the Targa Tenco for best debut in 2002, along with the Premio Carosone and the Premio De André. In 2003 he took third place at the Sanremo Festival with "Tutto quello che un uomo," and also won the festival's critics' prize and its award for best musical composition. EMI reissued the album with the Sanremo song, and a concert from the Teatro Strehler in Milan followed on video.

He kept the jazz players close. Sul sentiero (2004) added a horn and reed section to the trio, with Daniele Tittarelli on alto saxophone, Javier Girotto on baritone, Daniele Scannapieco on tenor, Gabriele Mirabassi on clarinet, Daniele Di Bonaventura on bandoneon and Nicola Stilo on flute, with Paolo Silvestri arranging for winds and strings. On July 16, 2004 he played Pescara Jazz billed as "Sergio Cammariere Jazz!!!" with Toots Thielemans and Toninho Horta as special guests. Il pane, il vino e la visione (2006) followed on Via Veneto Jazz, and in 2007 he was a guest vocalist on Bosso's Blue Note album You've Changed. He appeared at Sanremo as a guest in 2007 and as a competitor in 2008, singing "L'amore non si spiega" in a duet with Gal Costa. The 2008 collection Cantautore piccolino reached the top of the Italian album chart, went gold, and includes his reading of Keith Jarrett's "My Song" and a version of Bruno Martino's "Estate" with Bosso. Carovane (2009) brought in sitar, tabla and other Indian instruments, and in 2009 he sang the Italian version of Randy Newman's "Down in New Orleans" for Disney's The Princess and the Frog. In 2010 he and Bosso scored three Charlie Chaplin shorts for the Sounds for Silence series.

The albums since then alternate between song records and piano records. Sergio Cammariere (2012) ranges from bossa nova and samba to Balkan rhythms and has saxophonist Max Ionata and trombonist Roberto Rossi among its players. Mano nella mano (2014, Sony Music) has accordionist Antonello Salis, Bosso, vocalist Gegè Telesforo and guitarist Roberto Taufic, with a song built on a text by Bruno Lauzi. Io (2016) was recorded in Rome at the Casa del Jazz and the Auditorium Parco della Musica, with duets with Gino Paoli and Chiara Civello, a string orchestra directed by Paolo Silvestri, and a jazz waltz written as a tribute to Sergio Endrigo. Piano (2017) is his first solo piano album, 16 pieces that include several taken from his film scores, and Piano nudo (May 14, 2021) is a second, with 18 solo piano pieces. In between came La fine di tutti i guai (May 10, 2019), with Tittarelli on soprano saxophone, and a run of film scores that included Il banchiere anarchico, whose song "Anarchico" was nominated for a Nastro d'Argento in 2019.

In April 2020 he sang on the charity single "Tu, io e domani," written by Joe Barbieri and recorded with Bosso, Bulgarelli and the singer Tosca, with proceeds going to Italy's civil protection service during the first COVID-19 emergency. His autobiography Libero nell'aria, written with Cosimo Damiano Damato, came out from Rizzoli on March 23, 2021, and a 2003 concert from the Teatro Sistina in Rome was issued digitally that December as In concerto al Teatro Sistina. Una sola giornata (April 2023) moves through swing, jazz and bossa nova and was put together over about eight years. In October 2024 his home city of Crotone gave him its Pitagora d'oro honor, and in November 2025 he released La pioggia che non cade mai, again with lyrics by Kunstler and with bassist Ares Tavolazzi among the guests. The 1998 EP Tempo perduto was issued on streaming services in June 2026. He continues to record and perform.

Cammariere is first of all a cantautore, a singer-songwriter in the line of Luigi Tenco, Sergio Endrigo and Bruno Lauzi, and the Sanremo placing in 2003 brought him a national audience as a songwriter rather than as a jazz artist. What gives him a place beside jazz is the way the music is built. The harmony and the piano touch are jazz-schooled, the arrangements leave room for improvised solos by jazz players, the rhythm section is a working jazz trio, and the recordings from 2001 to 2006 appeared on a jazz imprint. English Wikipedia describes him as a jazz singer-songwriter, and Discogs files the 2017 Piano album under Contemporary Jazz. The reviewer in Jazzitalia compared his piano playing to that of Chick Corea, while noting that the songs are lyric-driven, with Kunstler's words setting the form.

His range is wide for a singer-songwriter. Latin rhythms (bossa nova, samba, tango) run through many of the records, Carovane reaches toward India, and the jazz repertoire shows up in small doses: "My Song" by Keith Jarrett, Bruno Martino's "Estate," a jazz waltz for Endrigo. The two solo piano albums and the long sequence of film and theatre scores show the other side, an instrumental composer who writes tunes as well as songs. Most of his catalog is song-based pop and cantautore music rather than jazz, and that should be said plainly. The jazz side is real and documented: the label, the band, the guests and the piano records.