Daniele Cavallanti was born in Milan on June 6, 1952, and started studying saxophone and clarinet at 14 with classical clarinetist M. Ezio Zappatini at the Civic School of Music of Sesto San Giovanni. His professional career opened inside Milan's 1970s progressive and world-fusion scene rather than a straight jazz room: he played in Gruppo Contemporaneo alongside trumpeter Guido Mazzon and pianist Gaetano Liguori, and joined Aktuala, the ethnic-instrument fusion group co-founded by percussionist Walter Maioli, appearing on its albums Aktuala (1973), La Terra (1974) and Tappeto Volante (1976). The same years brought session credits with two significant Italian songwriters, Franco Battiato (Sulle Corde Di Aries, 1973) and Claudio Rocchi (Il Miele Dei Pianeti Le Isole Le Api, 1974; A Fuoco, 1977; Non Ce N'è Per Nessuno, 1979) - real, Discogs-documented work, but outside jazz proper. He also led his own trio, with bassist Roberto Della Grotta and drummer Filippo Monico, releasing the LP Trio (1978, L'Orchestra), his first outing as a leader.

In 1979 and 1980 he lived in Amsterdam, playing with Dutch trombonist Wolter Wierbos, before returning to Italy to study harmony and arrangement with Angiolo Tarocchi. In December 1980 he co-founded Nexus with drummer Tiziano Tononi, then rounded out with trombonist Luca Bonvini and bassist Paolino Dalla Porta - the start of a working partnership with Tononi that has now run more than four decades, through Nexus records including Open Mouth Blues (1983), Night Riding (1986), We Still Have Visions (1998), Nexus Plays Nexus (2010), Experience Nexus! (2017), The Call: For A New Life (2021) and, most recently, Nexus Plays Dolphy (2024).

In 1990 Cavallanti was a founding member of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, assembled for the Festival di Noci alongside a horn section that would go on to include Gianluigi Trovesi, Carlo Actis Dato, Paolo Damiani, Alberto Mandarini and Pino Minafra. His tenure has proven exceptionally long: Discogs credits him on the orchestra's Live In Noci And Rive De Gier (1992), its ECM-released breakthrough Skies Of Europe (1995), European Concerts '94-'97 (1997), Litania Sibilante (2000, with guests Antonello Salis and Enrico Rava), Previsioni Del Tempo / Forecast (2002, also crediting Achille Succi), The Owner Of The River Bank (2003, a tenth-anniversary meeting with guest Cecil Taylor), London Hymns (2007, live at the London Jazz Festival), Creative Orchestra (Bolzano) 2007 (2008, with guest Anthony Braxton), Totally Gone (2010) and, 35 years after the orchestra's founding, Plays Ellington (2025, recorded live in Porto in 2013 and arranged/conducted by Giancarlo Schiaffini) - a tenure matched by very few of the orchestra's other original members.

Alongside the orchestra, Cavallanti built his own smaller-group catalogue. His own quartet, formed in 1991, recorded Times For Peace (1994) with American tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman as a guest, and later Holystone (2001); he also led the Jazz Chromatic Ensemble (Evening Standards And New Music, 1993; Skydreams, 1995) and the Daniele Cavallanti Double Trio (The Leo, 1988). With Tononi he also developed Udu Calls, a duo that became a trio in 1999 when the pair shared a bill at the Vancouver Jazz Festival with American bassist William Parker; the tape sat undiscovered for 15 years until Tononi found it and released it as The Vancouver Tapes (2014), reviewed by All About Jazz. A separate, ongoing duo partnership with bassist Giovanni Maier produced Blues In The Suq (2013) and Our Standards (2018).

In the 2000s and 2010s Cavallanti kept adding new working units: the Electric Unit, which recorded Smoke Inside (2006) with guest guitarist Nels Cline; Daniele Cavallanti & The Brotherhood Creative Trance Music Ensemble, whose Faces And Tales (2013) drew on Gianluigi Trovesi (alto sax) and Carlo Actis Dato (baritone sax, bass clarinet) as sidemen; the Milano Contemporary Art Ensemble (Sounds Of Hope, 2015); and A World Of Sound, his current working quartet, whose catalogue runs from its 2014 debut through Shadows (2019) to A Wall Of Sound (2025). His most recent project, Daniele Cavallanti & The Songlines Band, released The Dreamtime (2023, Felmay) with a two-trombone, two-bass lineup including soprano saxophonist Roberto Ottaviano; the album's six-page digipack carries Cavallanti's own text explaining his interest in Australian Aboriginal culture and Bruce Chatwin's writing, the source of its title.

Cavallanti's other significant sideman credits include Giorgio Gaslini's ensemble session Masks (1992, Musica Jazz/Soul Note), where his tenor sax sat alongside Trovesi, Damiani, Mandarini and Minafra; two albums with singer Tiziana Ghiglioni (A Male Walking In The Cauldron, 2009; Figli, 2011); and a run of dates as a guest in Tononi's own side-projects (the Society Of Freely Syncopated Organic Pulses, the Ornettians, Southbound), plus Herb Robertson's The Legend Of The Missing Link (2002) and The Brooklyn Express's No Time Left! (2016), both drawing on the same New York/Italy free-jazz axis.

Cavallanti's music sits in the free-jazz and avant-garde tradition that runs through Italy's cooperative big-band scene, shaped early by a world-fusion apprenticeship in Aktuala before settling, from the 1980s on, into two parallel commitments: Nexus, his small-group vehicle with Tiziano Tononi built on open, Ornette Coleman- and Don Cherry-influenced interplay (Tononi's own side-projects have paid tribute to both, and to Coltrane and Rahsaan Roland Kirk), and the Italian Instabile Orchestra, the large collectively-driven ensemble whose international profile brought him onto the same stage as Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton. Later projects widen that base further: the Electric Unit's rock-adjacent guest slot for Nels Cline, and the Songlines Band's engagement with Australian Aboriginal culture on The Dreamtime, both extending the same appetite for cross-genre and cross-cultural material that first appeared in his 1970s work with Aktuala.