Pasquale Stafano was born on December 2, 1972, in Stornarella, a small town in the Province of Foggia, in Puglia. He trained at the "Umberto Giordano" Music Conservatory in Foggia, earning a diploma in classical piano in 1994 and a second diploma in jazz in 2000, and holds a further degree in economics with a marketing specialization from the University of Foggia (2004). He is a professor of jazz piano at the "Luca Marenzio" Conservatory in Brescia, and since 1998 has taught classical piano, jazz, composition and arrangement at public and private schools and conservatories, giving workshops and masterclasses in Italy and abroad, including in South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and Thailand.

In 1996 he began playing as a duo with the Foggia-area musician Gianni Iorio, then still a pianist himself before he turned to the bandoneon. Three years later the two founded the Nuevo Tango Ensamble, built around Astor Piazzolla's tango nuevo repertoire alongside original material. As a quintet the group released its debut, Astor's Mood (Realsound, 2002), and continued as a trio with bassist Pierluigi Balducci on A Night in Vienna - For Astor Piazzolla (Philology, 2005), a live recording made at Porgy and Bess in Vienna. Tango Mediterraneo (Jazzhaus Records, 2008), credited to Nuevo Tango Ensamble with Discogs listing Stafano on piano and Alessandro Terlizzi on bass, added the clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi as a featured guest on five of its nine tracks. D'Impulso (Jazzhaus Records, 2011) followed as the group's most recent album under that name; per the artist's own website it features the saxophonist Javier Girotto, though that credit is not itemized on Discogs.

Iorio and Stafano then returned to a two-person format for two albums on the German label Enja Records: Nocturno (2016), a program mixing Piazzolla pieces ("Verano Porteño," "Invierno Porteño," "Adios Nonino") with other tango composers and two Stafano/Iorio originals, and Mediterranean Tales (2019), recorded at Artesuono Studio in Cavalicco, near Udine, in June 2018 and made up of six original compositions, four of them by Stafano. Both albums were reviewed by All About Jazz. His composition "Milonguita," first recorded on Tango Mediterraneo, was later rearranged for the Twelve Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic, who recorded it on their 2016 Sony Classical album Hora Cero; Stafano is credited there as composer only and does not perform on the recording.

In 2021 Stafano led a piano trio under his own name for the first time on record, with double bassist Giorgio Vendola and drummer/percussionist Saverio Gerardi, on Sparks (Enja Records), eight original compositions reviewed by All About Jazz and later featured in the Japanese magazine The Walker's (December 2023). His most recent album, Faber: A Jazz Tribute to the Music of Fabrizio De André (Da Vinci Jazz, 2025), reworks eight songs by the Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André - among them "Bocca di rosa," "La canzone di Marinella," "Creuza de mä" and "Il pescatore" - as a trio with bassist Daniele Cappucci and drummer Fabio Accardo, with vocalist Badrya Razem and accordionist Vince Abbracciante featured as guests on selected tracks.

Beyond his own catalog, Stafano has composed for film, working with Jungbum Kim on the score for the Korean director Ha Jung-woo's Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. Since 2010 he has founded and directed the Stornarella International Music Festival in his hometown. His own biography names the saxophonists Fabrizio Bosso and Max Ionata among his collaborators, alongside Girotto and Mirabassi, though no specific recorded, Discogs-credited session with Bosso or Ionata was found.

Stafano's catalog runs on two connected tracks that share him at the piano. The first is the long-running partnership with bandoneonist Gianni Iorio, built on Astor Piazzolla's tango nuevo book and, with Mediterranean Tales, on original writing that the duo has described as a move from tango-centered material toward music inspired by Mediterranean travel. Discogs files this side of his catalog under Jazz, with Latin and Classical as secondary tags and Tango as the recurring style descriptor - a genuine hybrid rather than a tribute act, closer in spirit to the classical-tango-jazz crossings of players like Richard Galliano than to a straight tango repertory group.

The second track is the piano-trio and small-ensemble work he leads under his own name: Sparks, a contemporary post-bop program for piano, bass and drums, and Faber, which sets Fabrizio De André's Italian songbook in a jazz trio frame with accordion and voice as color. Both are reviewed in the jazz press as straightforwardly contemporary jazz records rather than tango-adjacent ones, and both keep the same instinct that runs through the Iorio duo: original compositions built from a specific, named source (Piazzolla's tango, De André's canzone d'autore) rather than a standards repertoire.