Roberto Cipelli is an Italian jazz pianist, composer and arranger who has spent more than four decades at the center of one of the country's most durable working jazz groups while building a parallel career as a conservatory jazz educator. Born in Cremona on August 6, 1958, he began piano lessons at age eleven and trained classically at the Conservatorio "G. Verdi" in Milan before discovering jazz in 1975, when he and guitarist Riccardo Bianchi founded the Quartetto Jazz Cremona. He went on to study at the Istituto Nazionale Studi sul Jazz (I.N.S.J.) in Parma and, from 1979 to 1980, studied directly under pianist Franco D'Andrea at the Siena Jazz seminars. He later earned a degree with honors in musicology from the University of Bologna, specializing in Afro-American musical civilization.

It was at Siena Jazz in 1982 that Cipelli met trumpeter Paolo Fresu. The quintet they formed together, rounded out over the years by saxophonist Tino Tracanna, bassist Attilio Zanchi and drummer Ettore Fioravanti, has remained active for more than thirty years and is widely regarded by Italian jazz critics as one of the defining Italian jazz groups of its generation, with more than 850 concerts across Europe, Australia, Brazil and Asia. Cipelli's compositions and arrangements shaped much of the group's recorded output, including Night On The City (1995), which won the Prix Bobby Jaspar, and Kosmopolites (2005, Blue Note/EMI), an entire album on which the quintet performed Cipelli's own compositions as part of a "Plays The Music Of..." series devoted in turn to each member's writing.

Cipelli's own discography runs to more than 70 recordings. His leader debut, Moona Moore (1989, Splasc(h) Records), was billed to his own trio/quartet/quintet and featured Fresu and Tracanna as guests, with liner notes contributed by American saxophonist David Liebman. In 2007 he co-led the five-way collective project F. à Léo (Radio Fandango) with Fresu, drummer Philippe Garcia and singer-songwriter Gianmaria Testa, a tribute to French chansonnier Léo Ferré. Stilita (2011, Blue Serge) is a solo piano record alternating his own compositions with fully improvised passages. L'Equilibrio di Nash (2021, Tǔk Music) returned him to intimate duo format with Fresu, ranging across repertoire from the Italian song "Parlami d'Amore Mariù" to Chopin's Prelude No. 20, Op. 28.

Outside the Fresu Quintet, Cipelli was for years the regular pianist of the E.S.P. Trio, alongside Zanchi and drummer Gianni Cazzola, which backed American vocalist Sheila Jordan on Sheila's Back in Town (1999) and Straight Ahead (2005, also featuring Fresu on trumpet). He shared piano duties, on different tracks of the same record, with Giovanni Ceccarelli on Tiziana Ghiglioni's My Essential Duke Ellington (1998), which also featured Lee Konitz on two tracks, and recorded alongside American trumpeter Tom Harrell and drummer Massimo Manzi on vocalist Eva Simontacchi's Places (2012). He appears as special guest on Everybody's Song (2008), co-billed to vocalist Lara Iacovini, Zanchi, pianist Massimo Colombo and drummer Mauro Beggio.

Alongside performing, Cipelli has built a long teaching career: jazz theory, harmony and ensemble music at Milan's CPM (Civica Scuola di Musica, directed by Franco Mussida), department head of jazz studies at the Conservatorio di Trento since 2007, previously at Bologna University's DAMS program, and a piano seminar at the Jazz Department of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music under an Italian Foreign Ministry cultural exchange. Since 1996 he has also taught jazz at the Civic School of Music "Monteverdi" in his native Cremona, and since 2014 has directed the seminar program of the Nuoro Jazz festival in Sardinia. His honors include multiple Top Jazz awards (the Italian jazz-critics' poll run by Musica Jazz magazine) with the Fresu Quintet, the 1995 Prix Bobby Jaspar, a Prix Disque Choc, and a 2008 nomination for the Premio Tenco.

Discogs lists Cipelli's own name alongside three closely related group entities - "Roberto Cipelli Trio," "Roberto Cipelli Quartet" and "Roberto Cipelli Quintet" - all billing variations of the same working unit rather than separate musicians, folded together in the discography below.

Cipelli's pianism sits in the lyrical, harmonically rich post-bop mainstream that has defined the Paolo Fresu Quintet's sound for more than three decades, built on close listening and a classically grounded touch rather than overt virtuosity. His writing and arranging for the quintet favor long melodic lines suited to Fresu's flugelhorn, informed by his own training under Franco D'Andrea and by the structural discipline of his musicology studies. As a leader and duo partner, his work moves comfortably between straight-ahead small-group jazz and a more chamber-like intimacy: Stilita's solo piano recordings and L'Equilibrio di Nash's piano-and-trumpet duets both draw as readily on classical repertoire (Chopin, Monteverdi) and the Italian song tradition as on jazz standards, reflecting a pianist equally at home accompanying a singer, leading a quintet, or performing alone.