Mauro Gargano was born in Bari, in Italy's Puglia region, in 1972. He came from a non-musical family - his father raced cars, and the sound of engines rather than instruments filled his childhood - but he grew up loving music of every kind through his grandfather's and sister's record collections. He came to the bass relatively late and mostly self-taught, starting on electric bass at nineteen under bassist and organist Vito di Modugno, then picking up the double bass at twenty-three with Maurizio Quintavalle. He attended the Siena Jazz seminars in Italy, where his teachers included Paolo Fresu, Furio Di Castri and Marco Tamburini.

In October 1998 Gargano moved to Paris. After two years of classical double bass study at a Paris arrondissement conservatoire, he won entry to the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris (CNSM) in "Jazz et musiques improvisees." From 2000 to 2004 he studied jazz and contemporary double bass, composition and arrangement there with Riccardo Del Fra, graduating with the CNSM's First Prize in Jazz and Improvised Music. He has also taken masterclasses with Stefano Scodanibbio, Lee Konitz, Steve Lacy, Kenny Werner, Kenny Wheeler, Mark Dresser and Eric Harland.

Gargano has built a Paris-based career with a substantial discography, credited on around forty releases as a sideman alongside several as a leader or co-leader. His earliest documented Discogs credit is a 1999 appearance with Quartetto Moderno, followed in 2000 by two dates with Nicola Conte - the "Forma 2000" single and the album Jet Sounds - both crediting him on contrabass.

He made his debut as a leader with Mo' Avast Band (2011, Note Sonanti), a quartet record with Francesco Bearzatti on tenor saxophone and clarinet, Stephane Mercier on alto saxophone and Fabrice Moreau on drums, with Bruno Angelini guesting on piano for two tracks. The nine originals and two covers included a jazz arrangement of Coldplay's "Got Put A Smile Upon Your Face," a track Gargano chose for what he called its striking video and its theme of an awakening of consciousness.

His most ambitious leader project is Suite For Battling Siki (2016, Gaya Music Production), a fourteen-track suite narrating the life and unsolved 1925 murder of Franco-Senegalese boxer Battling Siki, organized around the cities of Siki's career - Saint-Louis, Marseille, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin and New York. The ensemble includes trumpeter Jason Palmer, saxophonist Ricardo Izquierdo, guitarist Manu Codjia, pianist Bojan Z (Bojan Zulfikarpasic) and drummer Jeff Ballard, with spoken narration voiced by Adama Adepoju and Frederic Pierrot.

Nuages (2021, Diggin Music Prod) turned to a smaller, more intimate format: a quartet with clarinetist Matteo Pastorino, pianist Giovanni Ceccarelli and drummer Patrick Goraguer, built around the idea of clouds as things that "come and go, are made and undone with the winds." Alongside nine originals, the album includes Django Reinhardt's own "Nuages," rearranged as a double bass and clarinet duo, and Domenico Modugno's "Che cosa sono le nuvole?," written for a segment of a Pier Paolo Pasolini film. The same year he released the trio record Feed (digginmusic prod) with pianist Alessandro Sgobbio and drummer Christophe Marguet, an all-original set recorded at Bop City Studio.

Gargano has also co-led a run of trio and quartet projects under shared billing: Invisible Wound (2008, AJMI Series) with pianist Philippe Le Baraillec and drummer Ichiro Onoe; So, Now? ... (2011, Sans Bruit) with pianist Bruno Angelini and drummer Fabrice Moreau; Involved (2012, Outnote Records), which added tenor saxophonist Chris Cheek to the Le Baraillec/Onoe trio and was recorded at Studio La Buissonne; Le Zouave Jacob (2013, Objet-a), a free-improvising trio with alto saxophonist Gianni Gebbia and percussionist Dario De Filippo, named for a nineteenth-century "healer" showman; Wings of Waves (2013, Cristal Records) with the Christophe Laborde Quartet, featuring pianist Giovanni Mirabassi and drummer Louis Moutin; and ANTS (2017, Gaya Music Production), a trio with saxophonist Ricardo Izquierdo and drummer Fabrice Moreau moving between modal jazz and Latin jazz.

His press biography also credits live work alongside Paolo Fresu, Brian Blade and Brad Mehldau, among roughly a hundred other musicians across jazz, classical and world music settings in Europe, Japan and North Africa - a claim from his own biography that is not independently confirmed at the recorded-credit level.

Gargano describes his own musical outlook as an attempt to combine traditional elements - jazz, classical music, folk music, pop-rock - and put them in dialogue with contemporary influences, rather than sitting inside a single lane. That range shows across his leader catalog: straight-ahead and contemporary acoustic jazz quartets make up most of his output, a fully improvised, electronics-inflected trio (Le Zouave Jacob) sits at one extreme, and Nuages leans toward a Gypsy-jazz-adjacent, clarinet-and-bass intimacy built around Django Reinhardt's own tune and a piece of Italian song repertoire. Suite For Battling Siki shows the same instinct at album scale: a narrative concept work built on jazz composition, structured almost like a song cycle with spoken interludes.