Daniele Di Gregorio was born in Urbino on August 21, 1962. He trained formally at the Conservatorio "G. Rossini" in Pesaro, graduating with top honors in percussion under Michele Jannaccone, and went on to specialize in marimba and vibraphone. In 1979 he won the E.K.Y.O. competition and took a seat in the Youth Orchestra directed by Claudio Abbado; that same year, drawn to jazz since childhood, he began studying improvisation with Giorgio Gaslini.

That relationship is the backbone of his jazz career, and it holds up at the Discogs credit level, not just in his own telling. He is independently confirmed on vibraphone, marimba, and percussion across seven Gaslini recordings spanning three decades: Monodrama (1984, Giorgio Gaslini Octet), Lampi = Lightnings (1994, Giorgio Gaslini Globo Quartet), Mister O - Jazz Opera (1997), Ballets (1998, Giorgio Gaslini Globo Quartet Plus String Quartet And Wind Quartet), Cantos (2000), Enigma (2001, Giorgio Gaslini Proxima Centauri Orchestra), and the 2012 compilation Suite 1994-2008. He is also listed among Discogs' Giorgio Gaslini group-membership entities for the Octet, Globo Quartet, and Proxima Centauri Orchestra by name. In 1983 he founded his own group, the New Old Way Quintet, which released Waxing On (1986, Splasc(h) Records).

Checking that discography directly turned up a real correction to the historical record: the Discogs release for Ballets (1998) credits vibraphone to both Andrea Dulbecco and Di Gregorio, a large-ensemble session (the Globo Quartet plus a string quartet and a wind quartet) that carried two vibraphonists, not one. Di Gregorio's stand-alone leader and co-leader discography is smaller: Sticks & Mallets (Altrisuoni, mid-1990s, with drummer Giampiero Prina), Bala Boloum - Percusa Live (2005, a duo with Brazilian-rooted percussionist Luis Agudo billed together as "Percusa"), a guest-artist credit on Simone Nobili's By the River (2017, Felmay), and his 2022 solo debut Atollo, a largely solo-marimba record for the "One Instrument" concept label that leans toward contemporary-classical minimalism rather than jazz. In 2021 he also recorded Buchla & Marimba with electronic musician Donato Dozzy, a further step outside jazz into electronic/classical territory.

Running alongside the jazz career, Di Gregorio built a long parallel life as an in-demand Italian pop-session percussionist: Discogs credits him on 17 separate Paolo Conte releases and tours between 1990 and 2023, plus 8 credits with Mina and one-off studio dates with Jovanotti, Anna Oxa, and Marcella Bella. His own biography describes this as "extensive work with Paolo Conte's orchestra" across major European and North American venues.

One further, widely-repeated claim needs a specific caveat rather than a flat retelling. Di Gregorio's own artist biography, published on Jazzitalia and mirrored in near-identical wording on an instrument maker's profile page, states that in 1985 and 1986 he studied technique and improvisation with Gary Burton at the Umbria Jazz clinics and won a Berklee College of Music scholarship personally presented to him by Astor Piazzolla. It is a vivid, specific-sounding story, and it appears consistently across every version of his biography found online. But every instance traces back to what reads as the same self-authored source text; no independent account (contemporary press, an Umbria Jazz historical record, or a Berklee record) could be found confirming the scholarship or Piazzolla's role in presenting it. It is reported here as his own account of his career, not as an independently verified fact.

Di Gregorio's identity as a player sits in the mallet-percussion tradition Gaslini's ensembles drew on for large-scale "total music" works blending jazz improvisation with 20th-century composition technique; his own recorded credits (vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, occasional balafon and keyboards) show a percussionist built for exactly that kind of orchestral-jazz writing. His own leader records pull in a different direction over time: the mid-1990s Sticks & Mallets and 2005's Afro-Brazilian-inflected Bala Boloum stay within a jazz/world-percussion idiom, while 2021's Buchla & Marimba (with electronic musician Donato Dozzy) and 2022's solo debut Atollo move into electronic and Steve Reich-influenced contemporary-classical minimalism, a genuine late-career departure from jazz rather than a jazz-adjacent side project.