Daniele Scannapieco was born in 1970 in Campagna, a town in the province of Salerno, in Italy's Campania region. He came to jazz through classical training rather than straight into a saxophone: he completed his classical studies at the Conservatory of Salerno in 1990, earning a diploma on clarinet, before moving to Rome in 1991 to work as a professional jazz musician. In Rome he quickly found his way into the city's working jazz scene, collaborating early on with bassist Giovanni Tommaso, pianist Stefano Bollani and pianist Danilo Rea.

His first Discogs-documented leader-level credit is Dreams (2000, YVP Music), co-billed to pianist Stefano Sabatini and featuring altoist Stefano Di Battista, bassist Dario Rosciglione and drummer Andre Ceccarelli. Two years later he issued his first solo-billed album, Daniele Scannapieco (also known as Midnight Sun, 2002), again with Di Battista alongside pianist Eric Legnini, and by then had also placed second at the Top Jazz critics' poll in both 2002 and 2003. In 2003 he won the Django d'Or - the pan-European award for the year's best young jazz talent - and the Positano Award for Campania's best musician, recognition of a saxophonist who by then was already working internationally: he spent three years touring worldwide with singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, recording with her on This Is New (2002) and Sings Kurt Weill Live At North Sea Jazz (2003), and built additional international credits alongside Henri Salvador, Joe Lovano, Hilton Ruiz, Greg Hutchinson, Joe Locke and Ira Coleman. Scannapieco has been repeatedly invited to Umbria Jazz's international programming, including concerts the festival organized in New York and Puerto Rico, and performed at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.

At home, his most consequential partnership was with trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso: together they co-founded The High Five Quintet, cutting Jazz For More... (2002, Via Veneto Jazz) and Jazz Desire (2004) as a co-led unit, Discogs-confirmed with Bosso on trumpet/flugelhorn and Scannapieco on tenor. Scannapieco also appears as a sideman on Bosso's own Rome After Midnight (2004, Sound Hills Records). From 2006, that same working band pivoted to back Italian soul singer Mario Biondi, recording and touring under him as "Mario Biondi And The High Five Quintet"; Scannapieco's association with Biondi's music stretched on for years afterward, with Discogs-documented studio credits running from Handful of Soul (2006) through If (2009), Due (2011), Sun and Mario Christmas (both 2013), Beyond (2015), Dare (2020) and Crooning Undercover (2023).

Never More followed in 2004 on Via Veneto Jazz, pairing Scannapieco's tenor with a string ensemble. That same year he guested, tenor saxophone Discogs-confirmed, on guitarist/producer Nicola Conte's Blue Note/Schema album Other Directions, a record that folded Scannapieco into the wider Bari-based club-jazz scene Conte was building; he returned for Conte's Sketches Of Samba (2008, Schema), credited this time as a member of "Nicola Conte And His Group." In 2007 Scannapieco joined bassist Giovanni Tommaso's new band Apogeo, alongside guitarist Bebo Ferra and pianist Claudio Filippini, documented on Jazzitaliano Live 2007 (Casa Del Jazz) and the group's 2010 studio debut Apogeo - Codice 5 (Saint Louis Jazz Collection).

His fourth leader album, Lifetime (2008, Picanto Records), reassembled Di Battista alongside trumpeter Flavio Boltro, pianist Julian Oliver Mazzariello, bassist Dario Rosciglione and drummer Andre Ceccarelli, and won the Italian Jazz Awards' Best Jazz Album prize in 2009 - the clearest critical high point of his leader discography. He followed it with Picanto Mood (2012, Jazzit Records), his fifth and most recent album under his own name. In 2019 he joined pianist Claudio Filippini's sextet Dirty Six, on the self-titled Dirty Six (Jando Music / Via Veneto Jazz), alongside trombonist Roberto Schiano, trumpeter Gianfranco Campagnoli and drummer Lorenzo Tucci.

Scannapieco continues to record and perform into the 2020s - Discogs credits him on Giovanni Scasciamacchia's Oriente (2020, Abeat Records), on the Monday Orchestra's Michael Brecker tribute Never Alone (2018, featuring Randy Brecker, Mike Mainieri and Bob Mintzer) and on singer Valentina Mattarozzi's Duetz (2026, Playaudio) - and teaches jazz saxophone improvisation and performance practice at the Conservatorio "Giuseppe Martucci" in Salerno, passing on the same institution where his own formal training began.

Scannapieco's core identity is a tenor-forward, standards-literate post-bop and hard bop voice, built around the same working rhythm-section personnel across most of his leader albums: bassist Dario Rosciglione and drummer Andre Ceccarelli anchor three of his five leader dates, with fellow saxophonist Stefano Di Battista appearing on two of them as a frontline partner rather than a guest. That pairing - two saxophones trading and blending rather than one horn out front - is a recurring texture of his own records, echoed by the presence of a second reed voice (Di Battista again, or trumpet from Bosso and Boltro) on nearly every leader session he has cut. Alongside that acoustic, mainstream-jazz core runs a long parallel life as a sideman in more groove- and vocal-oriented settings: the Bari club-jazz/Brazilian-tinged world Nicola Conte built through the 2000s, and, at greater length, the Italian soul of Mario Biondi's band, a relationship that has outlasted every other single affiliation in his discography. His conservatory training on clarinet before switching focus to saxophone, and his current teaching post back at that same Salerno conservatory, also mark him as a formally trained voice within Italian jazz rather than a self-taught one.