Cosimo Di Ceglie was born on October 21, 1913, in Andria, in Italy's Puglia region. He started out playing in his hometown's municipal band before moving to Milan in the mid-1930s, where he became the guitarist for fellow Apulian singer Mario Latilla. In the same period he recorded with bandleader Piero Rizza and with the Orchestra del Circolo Jazz Hot di Milano, a Milanese hot-jazz-club orchestra, and joined American trombonist Herb Flemming's touring group — Flemming, a veteran of international jazz revues who had toured Europe, South America and China, brought an internationally seasoned jazz band through Italy in the early-to-mid 1930s. Di Ceglie's work from this period, credited under his own name and alongside these groups, runs from 1936 to 1938.

Around 1938 he co-founded a small combo with pianist Enzo Ceragioli and accordionist Gorni Kramer — the musician who would go on to become, in the words of this vault's own Aldo Rossi profile, "Italy's most important interwar jazz bandleader." Sometimes expanded to a quintet, the group recorded original Italian-language arrangements of American swing repertoire between 1938 and 1941, including 1939's "China Boy," which added alto saxophonist Aldo Rossi and drummer Giuseppe "Pinun" Ruggeri to the core trio. (The group recorded and toured under more than one billing across this period, including one now-disowned period name reflecting American jazz-imitation naming conventions of 1930s Europe; it is preserved for cataloging accuracy in discography-full.md and discussed in cosimo-di-ceglie_notes.md, not repeated here.) During World War II, Di Ceglie stayed active on Italian radio, leading a six-piece ensemble.

Beginning in 1939, alongside his own performing career, Di Ceglie started composing songs for other artists, mostly with lyricist Gian Carlo Testoni. His most historically resonant credits as a songwriter date from 1942: "Quando l'organo suona" (lyrics by Nisa), recorded by the vocal group Quartetto Cetra; "La barca dei sogni" (lyrics by Testoni), recorded by Caterinetta Lescano of the Trio Lescano; and "Oi Marì, oi Marì" (lyrics by Nisa), recorded by the Trio Lescano itself and reissued for years afterward across multiple countries and languages — Discogs documents period pressings in German ("Oh Marie"), Dutch, and other European markets running into the mid-1940s. He returned to songwriting for two Sanremo Music Festival entries: "Buona sera" (1953, lyrics by Maria Evangelisti Tumminelli), sung by Carla Boni and Flo Sandon's, and "Splende l'arcobaleno" (1960), sung by Wilma De Angelis and Gloria Christian. Other songs of his were recorded by Peppino di Capri ("Lady," 1960) and, as late as 1975, by the group Homo Sapiens ("Ballerina").

Di Ceglie also kept recording and performing under his own name and as a bandleader for decades after the war — 78 rpm records, 45 rpm singles and EPs on the Parlophon, Columbia, Music and Sahara labels running from the 1940s into the 1960s and beyond, several under banners such as "Cosimo Di Ceglie e la Sua Orchestra," "e il Suo Quintetto" and "e il Suo Complesso." His English Wikipedia entry, sourced to jazz historian Adriano Mazzoletti's article on Di Ceglie in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2nd edition, ed. Barry Kernfeld), also credits him with later work alongside Adriano Celentano. He died in Milan on August 23, 1980, and is buried in the city's Cimitero Maggiore.

Di Ceglie's documented jazz significance is concentrated in a specific, real window: the mid-1930s to 1941, when he moved through Milan's small international jazz circuit — Herb Flemming's touring American jazz band, the Circolo Jazz Hot di Milano, and the Kramer/Ceragioli combo that adapted American swing standards for Italian audiences. Even Mazzoletti's own Grove Dictionary entry (reproduced closely in Di Ceglie's Discogs artist profile) frames the postwar decades as a separate, "less active" chapter as a jazz performer — a framing this profile preserves rather than blurs. That combo's guitar-piano-accordion instrumentation and small-group format sit inside the same European hot-club/gypsy-jazz-adjacent lineage documented elsewhere on Discogs: one of the trio's period recordings was anthologized decades later on Saga's Jazz À La Gitane Vol. 2 — Gypsy Jazz Around The World (2003).

What follows that window is a long, well-documented second career, distinct in character rather than a continuation of the same jazz identity: four decades as a prolific composer of mainstream Italian song repertoire (Sanremo Festival entries, hits recorded by the Trio Lescano and Quartetto Cetra) and as a working studio and dance-band guitarist across Italian light-music labels. Italian Wikipedia's own genre classification for him reflects exactly this split, tagging him with both "Jazz" and "Musica leggera" (light music). This profile does not treat that second career as diminishing his jazz standing during the period that earned him the Grove Dictionary entry, but it is disclosed honestly here rather than folded into an unqualified "jazz career" spanning his whole working life.