Claudio Angeleri was born in Bergamo, Italy, on June 27, 1956. He began piano lessons with Aldo Sala and started performing publicly in 1974; his first Discogs-documented recording is a 1977 date, on piano, for the Bergamo group Ziggurat's L'Altra Bergamo (Red Record), alongside a young Tino Tracanna on reeds. He went on to study further in the United States with pianist Mark Levine - a relationship independently documented by a photograph captioned "Con Levine" on his own website as well as by Italian Wikipedia and his official biography - and, per both Italian Wikipedia and his own published biography, also worked with Cedar Walton and Jaki Byard during the same period; no independent press source beyond his own official site corroborates the Walton/Byard portion specifically (see notes.md). He also studied at Trinity College London and graduated with top honors in jazz piano from the University of West London (London College of Music), while separately earning a degree in architecture from the Politecnico di Milano.

Angeleri built a substantial career as a bandleader and sideman through the 1980s and 1990s, recording with the ARP Quintet (Tango-Ing, 1984, with Tino Tracanna) and, on piano and electric piano, with the Sandro Cerino Action Quartet (Tom Thumb in the Magic Castle, 1987, and Che Fine Hanno Fatto I Personaggi Dei Sogni, 1989, both on Splasc(h) Records), sessions that also carry bassist Ares Tavolazzi. His own-name discography properly begins with Jazz Files (1996, CDpM LION), a quintet date on which Franco Ambrosetti (flugelhorn) and Bob Mintzer (tenor saxophone) both appear as credited guests, confirmed at the Discogs release level - directly substantiating the two names most associated with him in his own press biography. The same year's Pin Up (1996, CDpM LION) carries Gianluigi Trovesi on alto saxophone, the first of two Discogs-documented studio connections between the two Bergamo-area musicians. In 1998, Tourist Point of View - Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn (CDpM LION) paired Angeleri's quartet with alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano as guest soloist, again confirmed at the credit level.

Angeleri's discography since has continued at a steady pace: From Be To Pops (2002), Seven Steps to Hendrix (2012, a quintet set of eight Jimi Hendrix compositions reworked for jazz piano, electric piano, and reeds), Blues Is More (2019, Dodicilune, mixing original compositions with Bud Powell's "Dance of the Infidels," Duke Ellington's "A New World A-Comin'," and Monk/Hendricks's "Monk's Dream"), and Music from the Castle of Crossed Destinies (2021, Dodicilune), a nine-track suite built on Italo Calvino's novel Il castello dei destini incrociati, closing with a version of Monk's "'Round Midnight." In 2023, Dodicilune released Concerto feat. Gianluigi Trovesi, recorded live on May 20, 2023, at the Auditorium Modernissimo in Nembro - Trovesi's own hometown in the Bergamo province - with Trovesi returning on clarinet across a suite of pieces dedicated to historical and cultural figures including mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia, composer Gaetano Donizetti, pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, painter Caravaggio, poet Torquato Tasso, architect Giacomo Quarenghi, explorer Giacomo Costantino Beltrami, and the women of the Italian Resistance. Discogs' complete artist-relationship data for Angeleri totals 22 releases across all credited roles, a fraction of the roughly 23 leader albums and 50 sideman dates his own biography claims; the gap reflects how much of his catalog was issued on CDpM LION, his own teaching center's small private label, which is only partially documented on Discogs (see notes.md).

Alongside his performing career, Angeleri has run the Centro Didattico Produzione Musica (CDpM) in Bergamo since founding it in 1987, building it into an accredited jazz school (affiliated with Trinity College London and the University of West London) that has taught more than 20,000 students over its history and hosted masterclasses and seminars with musicians including Elvin Jones, Jim Hall, and Sarah Vaughan. Separately, since 1990 he has run a jazz-in-schools outreach program that has reached more than 40,000 primary and secondary students - a distinct initiative from CDpM's own enrollment. He has been artistic director of the Notti di Luce festival since 1999 (sixteen editions, with past collaborators including Lucio Dalla and Giorgio Albertazzi) and of Bergamo's UNESCO International Jazz Day activities since 2014, taught jazz piano and functional harmony at the Malta International Jazz Festival (2013-2015), and has been on the faculty of the Elba National Jazz Music Seminars and the jazz-ensemble master's program at Roma Tre University. In March 2023 he became founding president of the Associazione Nazionale Scuole Jazz e Musiche Audiotattili (ANSJ), a national association now representing more than 6,000 students, teachers, and school administrators across Italy's non-profit jazz education sector. He won third prize at the 1997 International Jazz Composition Competition at the Munich Conservatory and received the Enzo Fresia Prize in 2004. Separately from his own-name jazz combo work, Angeleri has also been the regular pianist since the mid-2000s in Nick the Nightfly's Monte Carlo Nights Orchestra, a swing-and-vocals big band (Discogs tags its albums Jazz, Easy Listening, Swing, and Vocal) that has recorded with singer Sarah Jane Morris and performed at Milan's Blue Note, Umbria Jazz, Genoa, and Florence. Angeleri remains active as both a performer and educator as of this writing.

Angeleri's playing sits in a standards-and-blues-based, hard bop-and-post-bop-descended mainstream jazz idiom, consistent with a pianist trained partly on the American bebop-to-hard-bop lineage (Mark Levine's own books are standard jazz-piano pedagogy, and Cedar Walton and Jaki Byard are both hard bop and post-bop figures). That foundation runs through his working quintet records - Jazz Files, Pin Up, Beatniks, Tourist Point of View, Blues Is More - built around Gabriele Comeglio and Giulio Visibelli, two reed players who appear on the large majority of his leader dates from 1996 onward. A second, more conceptual strand runs alongside it: Seven Steps to Hendrix reworks rock repertoire for a jazz quintet, while Music from the Castle of Crossed Destinies and Concerto feat. Gianluigi Trovesi are both narrative, dedication-driven suites that borrow structure and reference points from literature (Calvino), classical composition (Donizetti's Messa da Requiem), and the visual arts (Caravaggio) - a Third Stream impulse that also runs through Trovesi's own, more extensive body of classical-crossover work, made concrete by their two studio connections twenty-seven years apart. His long parallel career as an educator and school-network builder, culminating in the ANSJ presidency, is itself unusual among his generation of Italian sidemen-turned-leaders, and gives his catalog an unusually didactic, historically-referential character even on records without an explicit teaching angle.