Stefano Cerri was born September 22, 1952 in Milan, the son of jazz guitarist Franco Cerri, who taught him his first rudiments on the instrument. He debuted on Italian television at age eight, playing ukulele on the variety show Un due tre. He started out as a guitarist in dance bands before teaching himself electric bass, the instrument on which he built most of his recording career.

Through the 1970s he worked jazz dates alongside his father and a run of established Italian and visiting jazz musicians, all confirmed at the Discogs credit level: electric bass on the Mario Rusca Trio's 1974 debut Reaction, alongside pianist Rusca and drummer Gianni Cazzola; bass on the Eraldo Volontè Quartet's Safari (1975), with Guido Manusardi on piano and electric piano; and electric bass or guitar on at least nine of his father's own albums between 1975 and 1997, including Querce Platani & Cerri and From Cathetus To Cicero (both 1975), Franco Tony & Pompeo (1976, with clarinetist Tony Scott), Noi Duero (1978, with accordionist and bandleader Gorni Kramer), Today! (1984) and the Django Reinhardt tribute En Souvenir De Milan (1995). In 1983 he played bass on Effetto Alfa, a large-ensemble, strings-and-orchestra session co-led by his father and pianist Enrico Intra; in 1997 he played guitar, rather than bass, on the Cerri-Intra Ensemble's live album From Milan To Brussels, again alongside Intra and bassist Marco Vaggi.

In 1976 he co-founded Crisalide with drummer Mauro Spina and keyboardist Ernesto Vitolo, a group that backed singer-songwriter Eugenio Finardi; this was a rock, not jazz, project. From 1979 to 1980 he toured North America as part of Yes vocalist Jon Anderson's touring band, and played on Anderson's 1982 solo album Animation, recorded in London. Returning to Italy afterward, he became one of Milan's busier session bassists, playing on records by a long list of Italian pop and rock artists through the 1980s and 1990s, among them Eugenio Finardi, Alice, Fiorella Mannoia, Fabrizio De André, Eros Ramazzotti, Anna Oxa, Mina, Loredana Berté, Rettore, Pino D'Angiò, Edoardo Bennato, Marcella Bella, Orietta Berti, Dodi Battaglia, Mario Lavezzi, Franco Simone and Faust'o; that commercial session work makes up the large majority of his roughly 100-entry Discogs catalog.

Alongside that session career, he kept a parallel identity as a jazz bassist built around his own groups. According to his Italian-language biography, he formed the Latin jazz ensemble Chandé with drummer Walter Calloni and Colombian percussionist Candelo Cabezas; that group's output is not independently confirmed on Discogs. In 1992 or 1993 he co-founded Linea C with Calloni and pianist/keyboardist Massimo Colombo, an electric trio that recorded three albums blending jazz, fusion, classical and ethnic currents: Linea Di Confine (1993), Mappa Di Un Possibile Viaggiatore (1996) and Salti Ed Assalti (1999). Milan daily Il Sole 24 Ore and the Italian jazz press have repeatedly called Linea C the country's most well-known electric jazz trio. In 1999 he also released Fab Four-String, a solo album of Beatles songs rearranged for bass, and recorded Classic In Jazz with drummer Tullio De Piscopo and pianist Cesare Poggi, a trio built around jazz treatments of baroque and classical repertoire.

Cerri was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2000 and died from the disease on November 24 of that year in Milan, at 48. In 2015 the city named a 250-seat public auditorium on Via Valvassori Peroni, in the Lambrate neighborhood's Area M jazz quarter, the Auditorium Stefano Cerri in his honor; the jazz press has since used the venue for events including a bass-focused "Basso in rilievo" memorial program bearing his name.

Cerri's output splits cleanly into two bodies of work. The larger one, by volume, is Italian commercial pop and rock session work spanning three decades and dozens of artists' records - by Discogs count, the great majority of his roughly 100 logged releases. The smaller but better-documented thread is a genuine jazz identity: a working jazz-fusion trio of his own (Linea C, repeatedly singled out by Italian press as the country's leading group of its kind), a Latin jazz group (Chandé, per his biography), and two decades of session dates with established Italian jazz musicians, most often alongside his father. His own leader dates - the Beatles-on-bass record Fab Four-String and the classical-leaning trio session Classic In Jazz - sit at the jazz end of that split, closer to cool jazz and jazz-fusion vocabulary than to the pop sessions that paid most of his bills.