Riccardo Biancoli was born in Mantua in 1960. He started young in rock-progressive groups before turning almost exclusively to jazz, and his own namevariation on record, "Richi Biancoli," dates from those early years.

His first Discogs-documented jazz session was Mauro Negri's Patarau (1989, Splasc(h) Records, with special guest Franco D'Andrea), the same year he joined the Beppe Castellani Quartet for the first of what would become a recurring, decades-long relationship: Italian Standards (1989) and Italian Standards 2 (1990), both on Il Posto Records, with Beppe Castellani on tenor saxophone and Ares Tavolazzi on bass. In 1992 he stepped into a co-leader role for the first time on Poirot (Splasc(h) Records), an unusual chamber-quartet date with no piano or bass, billed jointly to clarinetist Mauro Negri, guitarist Simone Guiducci, cellist Marco Remondini and Biancoli himself on drums.

That same circle of Turin and Verona-area players brought him onto Simone Guiducci's 1994 leader debut, New Flamenco Sketches (Le Parc), a quintet session crediting Enrico Rava on trumpet and flugelhorn and Furio Di Castri on bass alongside Negri and Biancoli (a second drummer, Roberto Dani, is also credited on the release; the two players' track-by-track split is not itemized on Discogs). In 2002 he returned to co-billed session work on Guiducci's My Secret Love (Abeat Records), crediting Tavolazzi on bass, Paolo Birro on piano and Javier Girotto on soprano saxophone across a repertoire of American standards, Brazilian music, Django Reinhardt and Charles Aznavour.

Parallel to that session work, Biancoli became a fixture of Mantua's own jazz scene. Formed in Mantua in 2000, the Mantua Jazz Trio paired him with pianist Stefano Caniato and bassist Marco Cocconi across three studio records, Alessi's Blues (2001, Splasc(h) Records), Wonder Why (2003, Dischi Della Quercia) and My Wish (2006, Music Center), the last recorded after a 2004 Texas tour with Austin saxophonist Paul White. The trio's promotional description on the Swing Bar concert venue's site calls Biancoli "sensitive and balanced," in demand as both drummer and percussionist, and involved in multimedia and theatrical projects. A duo with Tavolazzi and guitarist Antonio Cavicchi followed on To Bill Evans (2008, Silta Records, Bill's Heaven Trio), and the same Mantua-based promotional bio credits him with performances and recordings alongside Lew Soloff, Yves Robert, Marc Abrams, Ruud Brink, John Mosca, Bosko Petrovich, Joe Krancker, Pietro and Marcello Tonolo, Sandro Gibellini, Franco Cerri, Roberto Soggetti, Franco Testa, Carlo Atti, Piero Odorici, Bruno De Filippi, Romano Mussolini, Enrico Intra and Guido Manusardi; none of these are independently confirmed at the Discogs credit level, so they are recorded here as a documented biographical claim rather than as verified cross-links.

His other groups on Discogs, Trapezomantilo Project, Carlo Ceriani Orchestra, Asymmetrique and No Smoking, span 1993 through 2020, and his most recent Discogs-verified date is Reflexes (Chamber Jazz Impromptus) (2023, Aulicus Classics), a Carlo Francesco Defranceschi quartet record with Caniato back on piano. As of July 2026 he remains an active performer, appearing on drums with the Simone Guiducci Special Edition Band at the Premio Kramer Jazz Night in Rivarolo Mantovano, a Mantua-province jazz festival date, and continuing his long-running membership in Mantua-area bands including No Smoking, FIV5 and Snap Trio per TRJ Records' own artist roster.

Biancoli's reputation, per his own promoters' description, rests on precision and balance rather than flash: a drummer sought after equally as a straight kit player and as a percussionist, able to support an ensemble's sound with elegance rather than dominate it. That range shows across his catalog, from the chamber-jazz instrumentation of Poirot, where there is no bass to anchor the time, to the standards-based piano-trio format of the Mantua Jazz Trio, to the more folkloric and Latin-inflected writing on My Secret Love, where Javier Girotto's Argentine-jazz vocabulary sits alongside straight-ahead swing.