Gigi Cifarelli, born Luigi Massimo Cifarelli in Pavia on May 25, 1955, is a Milan-based guitarist and singer who has been a fixture of the city's jazz and blues clubs since the 1980s. He began on the guitar as a child, mainly to accompany his own singing; the first player to fascinate him was Jimi Hendrix, which is where his lasting taste for the blues comes from, and he later adopted Wes Montgomery as his idol, with George Benson as the other great reference point. His father, a carabinieri marshal, wanted him to become a surveyor; he chose music.

His recorded debut as a leader, Coca & Rhum (1985, Dire, credited to "G.G. Cifarelli"), is a jazz-fusion record for electric guitar with a small band: bassist Vincenzo Lo Greco on fretless Fender bass, drummer Gianni Lo Greco, and guests Emanuele Cisi on tenor saxophone, Bruno De Filippi on harmonica and Karl Potter on percussion. It was produced by Alberto Radius (of the Italian band Formula 3) and Marco E. Nobili, and Discogs notes it as a record recommended by the magazine Guitar Club. The program pairs four originals (the title track, "Donnalisa," "Monk & Funk," "Borsa Nuova") with Herbie Hancock's "Cantalupe Island," Walter Booker's "Saudade," a solo reading of "I Can't Get Started," and "Ben...Sonata!," a tribute to Benson.

Kitchen Blues (1991), issued by the Milan label DDD (La Drogueria di Drugolo) in its "Strumento" series of instrumentalists' albums, followed with eight tracks of his own music, including "Doctor Taylor," the title track and "Letter to Wes," a dedication to Montgomery. Italian Wikipedia lists the supporting cast as Area pianist Patrizio Fariselli, bassists Paolino Dalla Porta and Marco Micheli, drummers Alfredo Golino and Paolo Pellegatti, percussionist Angelo Pusceddu, saxophonists Amedeo Bianchi, Emanuele Cisi and Michael Rosen, trumpeter Demo Morselli and singer Angela Baggi; Discogs does not itemize personnel for the record, so that lineup is the Wikipedia account. The same series also carries Alberto Borsari's 251 (1992), on which Cifarelli plays guitar.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s he was also a busy studio guitarist on Italian pop and jazz-funk records. Discogs documents guitar on three Mina albums, Uiallalla (1989), Ti Conosco Mascherina (1990) and Caterpillar (1991), and again on her 2020 Orione (Italian Songbook); on Massimiliano Pani's L'Occasione (1991); on Daniele Silvestri's debut Prima Di Essere Un Uomo (1995); and on the jazz-funk and acid-jazz group Dirotta Su Cuba's Nonostante Tutto... (1996). On the jazz side, he plays guitar and sings on Giampiero Prina's The World of Isher Suite (1992) with Attilio Zanchi on bass and Emilio Soana on trumpet, and takes the electric guitar feature on the title track of Area's Chernobyl 7991 (1997), alongside Fariselli and Dalla Porta. Italian Wikipedia reports that readers of the specialist press voted him best jazz and fusion guitarist five years in a row, after which he was moved out of the ballot so that other players could win.

In 1995 Marcel Dadi invited him to the Les Nuits de la Guitare festival in France, where the bill included John Scofield, Mike Stern, Bireli Lagrene, Philip Catherine and Toots Thielemans; he was then made godfather of the festival at Sète, where he played with Lagrene and Sylvain Luc, and French television devoted an hour-long special to him. Italian Wikipedia also lists him as having worked alongside Chick Corea, Sam Rivers, Jack DeJohnette, Gerry Mulligan, Tony Scott, Brian Auger, Jimmy Owens and Mark Murphy. These are the artist's own biographical claims; none of those musicians appears among his Discogs credits.

His next album, With the Eyes of a Child (2000, Canubi; the lead single "Don't Do It" was issued on Ricordi/BMG), mixes originals with "The Long & Winding Road" and "My Funny Valentine." In June 2008 he recorded three nights at Le Scimmie, the Milan jazz club, with singers Aida Cooper and Ronnie Jones as guests; the recording appeared in 2009 as Io c'ero (Discogs lists it as Gigi Cifarelli Live, Advice Music), a set of "Sunny," "Stormy Monday," "God Bless the Child," "E Se Domani" and an Italian-songbook medley. In 2008 he also received the Premio Nazionale Franco Enriquez, a theatre prize awarded to a musician for the first time, for "artistic commitment and coherence combined with great communicative force." He has since built a George Benson tribute program, a soul-blues-jazz project with Ronnie Jones, and a working group billed as the Power Band, and he has been an official testimonial for the City Angels volunteer group since 2023. He is also a former competitive cyclist who has said he sometimes turned down work to keep racing and training.

Cifarelli plays electric jazz guitar in the line that runs from Wes Montgomery to George Benson, and he names both in his own track titles ("Letter to Wes" and "Ben...Sonata!"). His records sit in jazz-fusion, jazz-funk and jazz-blues territory: funk and Latin grooves on Coca & Rhum and Kitchen Blues, and a club-band, singer-friendly blues and standards program on the 2009 live record. He also sings, and his repertoire mixes standards, soul and blues with Italian songs. Alongside the jazz catalog runs a long career as a session guitarist for Italian pop artists such as Mina and Daniele Silvestri; that work is documented below, but his own recordings, his reader-poll standing and his live work are all in jazz and fusion.