Claudio Filippini was born in Pescara, in Italy's Abruzzo region, in 1982. He earned his piano diploma at the Conservatorio "G.B. Pergolesi" in Fermo, and at 17 won a scholarship to Columbia College of Music in Chicago. Further scholarships followed at the Seminari Senesi di Musica Jazz (2000) and the "We Love Jazz" workshop with Kenny Barron (2001); in 2002 he took first prize at the Yamaha Music Foundation of Europe's European Piano Solo Competition, and in 2003 the Premio Massimo Urbani, awarded by both jury and audience. Along the way he studied and performed alongside Kenny Barron, George Cables, Jimmy Owens, Joey Calderazzo, Enrico Pieranunzi, Franco D'Andrea, Otmaro Ruiz, Stefano Bollani and Stefano Battaglia.

His working trio with bassist Luca Bulgarelli and drummer Marcello Di Leonardo took shape around 2004; an early Discogs-documented credit under his own name, Love Is The Thing... And The Blues Too (2004, Philology), already carries this billing. A parallel, more exploratory side project, Eij ("Engineering Institute of Joy," 2008), paired him on keyboards and electronics with trumpeter Giorgio Distante and guitarist Alessandro Nosenzo in a Discogs-tagged Future Jazz/Ambient vein; a secondary biographical source (Rockit) describes a similarly-dated electronics-and-trio concept release as "Space Trip," likely the same project under a variant title, though this could not be independently confirmed and is disclosed rather than merged in the notes file. The trio's real breakthrough came in 2011: signed to the prestigious CAM Jazz label, The Enchanted Garden was received in the Italian jazz press as the arrival of, in one widely echoed phrase, a new "wonder boy" of Italian jazz.

2011 was also the year Filippini's own-name work intersected with two much larger stages. From 2010 (into 2014, per his own official biography, though a secondary press source gives 2015 - both years are reported here rather than silently picked) he served as the touring pianist for singer Mario Biondi's band, an Italian soul/pop act, playing more than 40 countries; Discogs documents him on Biondi's Due (2011), Sun (2013) and Mario Christmas (2013). In the same period, trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso recorded Enchantment - L'Incantesimo di Nino Rota, a full album of Nino Rota's film themes with the London Symphony Orchestra, arranged and conducted by Stefano Fonzi and recorded at Air Studios in London on June 21-22, 2011. Filippini played piano on the session alongside bassist Rosario Bonaccorso and drummer Lorenzo Tucci - a credit confirmed by contemporary Italian press coverage of the release (Rockit, mescalina.it) though Discogs' own release entry for the album lists only Bosso, the orchestra and its conductor, without breaking out the rhythm section; the gap is disclosed in the notes file. Filippini and Bosso also recorded together, Discogs-confirmed, on the quartet live album Quattro + Quattro (2013).

For two further CAM Jazz albums, Facing North (2013) and Breathing In Unison (2014), Filippini's trio took on an internationally pedigreed rhythm section: Swedish bassist Palle Danielsson, best known for Keith Jarrett's "European Quartet" and long ECM associations with Jan Garbarek, and Finnish drummer Olavi Louhivuori, known from Tomasz Stanko's quartet. The regular trio with Bulgarelli and Di Leonardo resumed for Squaring The Circle (2015), released for the trio's tenth anniversary; Filippini's own liner note calls the group's identity a balance of "fondness for standards and, thus, tradition, but also experimentalism that derives from the need to renew ourselves... mixing electronic and psychedelic sounds." Overflying (2016), a solo piano record, carried liner notes from the respected jazz critic Brian Morton, co-author of the Penguin Guide to Jazz, who also wrote the notes for 2018's Two Grounds.

Two Grounds (2018, recorded live in 2017 at Le Due Terre Winery in Prepotto, Friuli) marked a turn toward electric instrumentation, with Filippini on Fender Rhodes and keyboards alongside electric bassist Andrea Lombardini and drummer U.T. Gandhi, while Before The Wind (2018) returned to the acoustic Bulgarelli/Di Leonardo trio. In 2017 he joined pianists Mirko Signorile and Giovanni Guidi for the three-piano session The Three Pianos (Musica Jazz), with liner notes contributed by trumpeter Paolo Fresu; in 2019 he formed the sextet Dirty Six with drummer Lorenzo Tucci, saxophonist Daniele Scannapieco, trombonist Roberto Schiano, trumpeter Gianfranco Campagnoli and bassist Tommaso Scannapieco. He has also recorded a duo album, US: (2006, Giotto Music), with collaborator Daniele Mencarelli, and appears at the piano on the opening track of singer Simona Molinari's Mercedes Sosa tribute Hasta Siempre Mercedes (2023, BMG).

Filippini teaches jazz piano at the Conservatorio "Luisa D'Annunzio" in his native Pescara. In 2023 he launched his own label, Filippismo Music, releasing Filippismo Live at the Spheres, recorded at Spheres Studios in Montesilvano. His own official biography also credits a 2018 first prize at the FIDELIO international composition competition for his piece "Voilà" (out of 215 entries from 40 countries) and performances alongside Wynton Marsalis, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Mike Stern; these claims could not be independently corroborated beyond his own site and are reported as self-sourced rather than verified (see notes.md).

Filippini's core identity is the acoustic piano trio in a lyrical, standards-literate post-bop vein - the format he has returned to across four CAM Jazz albums with Bulgarelli and Di Leonardo bookending a two-album detour with the ECM-pedigreed Palle Danielsson and Olavi Louhivuori. That detour is audible: Facing North and Breathing In Unison lean into a spacious, Scandinavian-inflected chamber sound closer to the Jarrett/Garbarek/Danielsson lineage than to American hard bop. Running alongside that acoustic identity is a recurring electronic thread - the 2008 Eij project, and Two Grounds's Fender Rhodes-led live set with Andrea Lombardini and U.T. Gandhi - that Filippini himself frames as the counterweight to the trio's more traditional standards repertoire. His session work splits similarly: film-adjacent orchestral jazz (Bosso's Nino Rota tribute), Italian soul-pop (the Mario Biondi band), and straight-ahead sideman dates (Giovanni Tommaso's Apogeo, Maria Pia De Vito's Songs From The Underground) sit alongside his own leader catalog without one crowding out the others.