Gianni Coscia was born January 23, 1931 in Alessandria and started out as a practicing lawyer before committing to jazz accordion full time. He has spent his career chasing what he describes as the remote values of cultural and popular tradition, expressed through the language of jazz. His former college classmate, novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, wrote the liner notes for several of his records, and Coscia also collaborated with composer Luciano Berio on the music for a stage show against antisemitism.

Since 1995 he has run a long-running duo with clarinetist and saxophonist Gianluigi Trovesi, already profiled on jazzprofiles.com, recording mainly for ECM Records: Radici (1995), In Cerca di Cibo (2000), Round About Weill (2005), and Frère Jacques (2011). He has also recorded with Enrico Rava and, on 2018's Sospiri Sospesi, with Daniele di Bonaventura, both already profiled here. Since 2006 he has served on the Council of the Chigiana Music Academy in Siena.

Coscia's playing draws on popular and folk Italian musical tradition filtered through jazz vocabulary, a combination that has defined his long-running duo work with Gianluigi Trovesi and shaped his own leader records across a career that began as a second, part-time pursuit alongside law.