Tullio Mobiglia was born on April 12, 1911 in Carezzano, a small town in the Alessandria province of Piedmont. He trained first on violin before taking up the saxophone, and by the late 1930s he had built a reputation as one of Italy's leading jazz tenor saxophonists. Early in his career he spent stretches aboard transatlantic ship orchestras sailing to the United States, which put him in direct contact with the American jazz scene; according to his own account he jammed on these trips with Coleman Hawkins, though no studio recording of the two together is documented.

In 1940 Mobiglia traveled to Berlin as part of the Italian Orchestra Mirador. He joined the Heinz Wehner Orchestra in February 1941, then formed his own sextet, which played Berlin's Patria Bar between April and November 1941. With this group he cut his first studio sides for Brunswick that October. Between 1942 and August 1943 his Bar-Orchestra was the house band at another Berlin club, the Rosita Bar, and during this run the group recorded its best-known side, "Lieber Sonnenschein," a swing arrangement of Mario Panzeri and Gorni Kramer's Italian song "Pippo Non Lo Sa." The band Mobiglia led without interruption in Berlin from April 1941 to August 1943 was, alongside the Kramer Orchestra of the late 1930s, one of only two stable Italian jazz ensembles working through the years 1935 to 1943, a run that historian Adriano Mazzoletti documents in his liner notes to the 2001 reissue compilation of these recordings.

Mobiglia returned to Italy in 1943 as the war closed in on Berlin, and he resumed recording in 1945 with a new big band, cutting sides for Columbia and later Telefunken, Cetra and Durium through the following decade. His 1946 single "Rhumboogie / Southern Fried" (Telefunken) and a run of Durium singles through the 1950s, including "Hot Boogie" (1950) and "The Boogie Boo," kept his orchestra working the same swing and boogie-woogie vein that had made his Berlin band's name. He also recorded dance-orchestra sides for the Yugoslav label Jugoton and shared billing with fellow Italian bandleader Edoardo Lucchina on a 1956 Durium ten-inch LP of dance numbers. Through the late 1950s and into the 1960s he continued to lead and record dance orchestras for Durium, including the 1957 EP "The Deep Blue Sea" with arranger Carlo Savina and a run of 1961 singles setting Italian standards such as "'O Sole Mio" to dance-band arrangements.

Alongside bandleading, Mobiglia returned to his first instrument, the violin, later in his career. In 1967, at age 56, he moved to Helsinki, Finland, where he taught violin at the Jan Sibelius Academy into the 1980s. Discogs also credits a violinist "Tullio Mobiglia" on a handful of Finnish light-music, schlager and children's-record sessions from 1979 to 1985, consistent with session work during his Helsinki teaching years, though these are sideman credits unconnected to his earlier jazz bandleading. He died in Helsinki on July 24, 1991, at the age of 80.

His 1940s recordings have been reissued repeatedly in the decades since: Riviera Jazz Records compiled his Berlin and postwar sides across two CDs, "The Complete Tullio Mobiglia (1941-1946) Vol. 1 - Jazz In Italy In The 40's" (2001) and "The Complete Tullio Mobiglia (1945-1951) Vol. 2" (2013), and individual sides from this period continue to appear on German and Italian swing-era anthologies, including the 2017 Django Reinhardt retrospective "Django, La Vraie Histoire," which carries his recording of "Joseph! Joseph!"

Mobiglia's recorded catalog sits almost entirely inside swing and big-band jazz. Discogs tags his 1940s Durium and Telefunken sides Jazz, with Swing as the dominant style; several, including "Star Dust / Carnavale A Cuba," add Big Band and Afro-Cuban tags reflecting the Latin-tinged dance numbers his orchestra also played. A 1982 compilation pairing his Berlin-era vocal swing side "Piccola" with other period recordings is titled plainly "Ritorna Lo Swing" ("Swing Returns"), and a 1983 anthology places him on "A Tempo Di Swing Vol. 2" alongside other period big bands. His style drew directly on the American swing he encountered on ship-orchestra crossings to the United States and absorbed firsthand from touring American saxophonists; Adriano Mazzoletti's liner notes for the Riviera Jazz compilations describe him as probably the most accomplished Italian jazz saxophonist of his generation. A handful of his later Durium dance sides, such as the 1956 ten-inch shared with Edoardo Lucchina, lean toward easy-listening ballroom dance music rather than jazz proper, and his 1979-1985 Finnish session work as a violinist sits outside jazz entirely, in children's records and Finnish-language schlager and pop singles.