Michelangelo Scandroglio was born in 1996 in Grosseto, in Tuscany's Maremma region, and grew up first on rock and blues before turning to the double bass at thirteen, after seeing one for the first time on a trip to Barcelona. A later move to Florence, in his own telling, opened up new musical directions. He studied jazz double bass with fellow bassist Ares Tavolazzi and classical bass with Gabriele Ragghianti at the Conservatorio Luigi Boccherini in Lucca, and between 2016 and 2019 attended the Siena Jazz International Summer Workshops, where his teachers included Joe Sanders, Harish Raghavan, Ben Street, Furio Di Castri, Aaron Parks, Ben Wendel, Miguel Zenón, Avishai Cohen and Jeff Ballard.

Competition recognition followed quickly. In 2018 he reached the finals of the Jazz Bass category at the Riga Jazz Stage international jazz competition and won the Tomorrow's Jazz award from Veneto Jazz, and in 2019 his group took first prize at the Conad Jazz Contest, part of the Umbria Jazz festival, with saxophonist and Umbria Jazz figure Paolo Fresu on the judging panel. His debut album as a leader and composer, In The Eyes Of The Whale, followed on the Italian label AUAND in January 2020, a septet session with pianist Alessandro Lanzoni, drummer Bernardo Guerra, saxophonists Logan Richardson and Michele Tino, guitarist Peter Wilson and trumpeter Hermon Mehari.

2021 was a year of new bands and a first international win. With pianist Xavi Torres, drummer Bernardo Guerra and dancer Karen Lugo he toured Western and Central Europe and South Korea as Barencia, a project the four had formed at Siena Jazz; that same year, Musica Jazz's Top Jazz poll placed him among Italy's best new jazz talents (accounts differ on the exact ranking; see this profile's notes), and his quintet won the band competition at the Getxo International Jazz Festival in Spain, a result documented on the 2022 live album Live in Getxo (Errabal Jazz), recorded with saxophonist Nicola Caminiti, trumpeter Paolo Petrecca, pianist Emanuele Filippi and drummer Luca Caruso. He has since split his time between Italy and Paris, where he is now partly based. Later honors reported in his own biography and press coverage include an invitation to the Beijing Jazz Festival, the Premio SIAE for composition, and, in 2022, selection for the Kennedy Center's Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program in Washington, D.C.

Alongside his own bands, Scandroglio has built a sideman career on the same Italian jazz scene that produced him. He plays double bass on guitarist Luca Zennaro's When Nobody Is Listening (2020, Caligola), a session that also carries trumpeter Jacopo Fagioli and, on four tracks, Alessandro Lanzoni on piano, and on guitarist Francesco Zampini's quintet album Unknown Path (2020), alongside Russian trumpeter Alex Sipiagin. He is the bassist on saxophonist Guido Spannocchi's Perihelion (2021, Audioguido Records), recorded in London with trumpeter Jay Phelps and pianist Robert Mitchell, and appears as a guest on Adriano Clemente's large-ensemble double album The Coltrane Suite And Other Impressions (2023, Dodicilune), where several of his tracks overlap with drummer Hamid Drake's own featured credit. In 2025 he recorded bass on pianist Hakan Başar's trio album Maiden Voyage (Red Record), and in 2026 rejoined Francesco Zampini, this time in a trio with American drummer Jeff Ballard, for Somewhere, Everywhere (Red Records).

His second album as a leader, Gently Broken (AUAND, March 2024), moved toward funk and soul-inflected material and a more production-conscious approach; Scandroglio has described the record as an attempt "to combine my old values with my more recent interests" and to understand how production and composition fit around improvisation, with singer Liselotte Ostblöm and saxophonist Francesco Panconesi both guesting on individual tracks. The following year he formalized a duo with guitarist Luca Zennaro, Escanzen, an electric, sample-based project whose debut, To Not Forget The Stars (2025, AUAND), brings in guests Alessandro Lanzoni, Francesco Bearzatti and Federico Calcagno. Barencia also released a standalone, self-titled studio album in 2025, a nine-track sequence framed as a musical journey from Barcelona to Florence.

His own biography and German-language Wikipedia entry also name a wider circle of musicians he has worked with, among them Enrico Rava, Fabrizio Bosso, Stefano "Cocco" Cantini, Flavio Boltro, Ben van Gelder, Alex Sipiagin, Gregory Hutchinson and Seamus Blake. No independently verifiable recording session with any of these musicians could be confirmed for this profile; see michelangelo-scandroglio_notes.md for the sourcing trail.

Scandroglio's core sound, on In The Eyes Of The Whale and the Live in Getxo quintet, is a contemporary, post-bop-rooted acoustic jazz built around his own compositions, with horns trading over a working rhythm section; reviewers and presenters describing the Getxo band have pointed to a Mediterranean, European-inflected undercurrent alongside straightforward swing. Gently Broken pulls that core toward funk and soul, tagged as such on its own release data, while keeping the same compositional instincts. Escanzen, his duo with guitarist Luca Zennaro, is a different proposition altogether: electric bass and guitar built around samples and studio production rather than an acoustic rhythm section, closer to nu jazz than to his own leader records. Running through all three is a stated interest in narrowing the gap between improvisation, composition and studio production, the idea he has said drove Gently Broken in particular.