Valerio Chiovarelli is a Piedmontese accordionist and tuba player who has spent two decades working the jazz festival circuit around Turin while also reworking the accordion's own bass mechanics for jazz use. Born in Chieri, near Turin, in 1982, he started on accordion almost by ear at age four, picking it up from an older brother, before studying the instrument formally with Michele Bevilacqua and classical composition with Guido Donati from age twelve. He later added a tuba diploma at the Conservatorio G. Verdi in Turin, studying under Rino Ghiretti; his own website gives the graduation year as both 2012 (Italian-language version) and 2021 (English-language version), a discrepancy that has not been independently resolved.

In an interview with the Italian jazz magazine Jazzit, Chiovarelli credits brothers Claudio and Fulvio Chiara with pulling him into jazz, recalling that Claudio booked his first real concert on a bill that also featured saxophonist Lee Konitz. He describes having learned jazz largely on his own from there. His performing career has run through several group projects - the Torino Jazz Orchestra, the D'Accordeon Quintet he founded, I Musicanti di Riva presso Chieri, the Enquat Jass Band, and his own Valerio Chiovarelli Quintet, which has performed a "Palabra de Cuba" program at regional festivals - and a run of festival dates including the Due Laghi Jazz Festival, the Altitude Jazz Festival in Briancon, Moncalieri Jazz, Clusone Jazz, the Piossasco Jazz Festival, the Torino Jazz Festival and the Piacenza Jazz Festival, according to his own biography. In 2020 he placed first in the jazz category of Castelfidardo's International Accordion Prize (PIF), performing in a duo with trumpeter Fulvio Chiara - an award independently corroborated by Italian trade press coverage of the competition.

At the Discogs credit level, his confirmed session work includes accordion on the folk ensemble La Lionetta's Arzan (2003), tuba and a composing credit on A Steam Jazz Band's Old Degeneration (2013, tagged Jazz and Dixieland on Discogs), tuba on singer-songwriter Paolo Conte's Snob (2014-2015, tagged Jazz and Latin), and accordion on the 2017 release Collectif Manouche (tagged Jazz, Swing and Gypsy Jazz). His own leader catalog arrived later, in a cluster: Jouer, released in 2024 on Art In Live Editions, documents a studio session recorded in 2016 with the French accordionist Marcel Azzola, who died in 2019, built on jazz standards including "Autumn Leaves" and "Bluesette" alongside an Azzola co-composition, "Double Scotch." The same year brought Friends, a set of jazz standards - "Hello Dolly," "China Boy," "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" - that also includes a cover of Paolo Conte's own "Bartali," and In Viaggio con Mario Piovano, a collaborative album built around the songs of Piedmontese composer Mario Piovano.

Chiovarelli has also designed and patented his own left-hand chord system for accordion, the Chiovarelli Jazz System (CJS), which replaces the standard Stradella system's triads with bichords specifically to make jazz voicings more playable on the instrument's bass side.

Chiovarelli works at the intersection of jazz and the European accordion tradition, moving between straight-ahead jazz repertoire (standards like "Autumn Leaves," "Bluesette," "Hello Dolly" and "China Boy"), Dixieland-style ensemble playing (A Steam Jazz Band), and the gypsy-jazz and swing idiom documented on Collectif Manouche. His chanson and musette-adjacent material - "La Javanaise," "L'Accordeoniste," his work alongside Paolo Conte, and the Piedmontese-song collaboration In Viaggio con Mario Piovano - reflects the same continental current that runs through much of the European jazz-accordion lineage. His invention of the Chiovarelli Jazz System, a bichord-based alternative to the accordion's standard bass system aimed specifically at jazz harmony, is itself a statement of that identity: an attempt to make the instrument's left hand function more like a jazz pianist's.