Gavino Murgia was born in 1969 in Nuoro, a town in the mountainous interior of Sardinia, and is a saxophonist, flutist and singer who plays jazz and Sardinian tradition as one language. Besides the four saxophones he plays flute and the launeddas, the triple reed pipes of Sardinia, and he sings the bassu, the lowest voice of the four-voice Sardinian choral tradition known as cantu a tenore. In a 2015 interview with Blogfoolk he put the balance this way: when he plays jazz he has a Sardinian accent, and when he plays Sardinian music the colors of jazz come in.

His route into jazz began at home. His father, Bustianu, was a furniture maker and a saxophonist in Nuoro's municipal band, and kept a record collection of jazz and classical music. Murgia was given a recorder at five, attended his first jazz concert, a Paul Motian quartet, at eleven, and at about twelve picked up his father's saxophone and taught himself. In 1989 he took part in the first edition of the jazz seminars held in Nuoro, organized by Paolo Fresu and the opera singer Antonietta Chironi. He then went to Siena and passed the selection rounds for the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana di Jazz without a conservatory diploma, spending three years in it as a tenor saxophonist; a Sardinian profile says the conductor Bruno Tommaso had encouraged him to audition, a claim documented in press coverage rather than in a recording credit. German Wikipedia adds that he played in the Orchestra Jazz della Sardegna under Tommaso, Giancarlo Gazzani and Mario Raja, and spent five years in Raja's twelve-piece big band, touring Italian festivals, Europe, South Africa, the United States and Cuba.

The Sardinian side ran alongside, not after. He sings in the tenore group Tenores de Gòine of Nuoro, active since 1997, with Antonello Mura, Giovanni Mossa and Francesco Pintori, taking the bass part. He studied ethnomusicology under Pietro Sassu at the Sassari conservatory, did fieldwork on secular and religious polyphony in Bortigali and on tenore singing in Oliena and Orune, learned the launeddas from Cesare Carta and Franco Melis, and names Luigi Lai as his main reference on the instrument. He runs his own label, Mankosa, which issued his 2009 quintet album and a 2007 recording of the Orune tenore group that he produced, recorded and photographed.

His recording career starts as a sideman. He plays saxophone, launeddas and bass vocals on the 1998 album Liberos Rispettatos Uguales by the Sardinian rock band Kenze Neke, then soprano and tenor saxophone on the Riccardo Lay Quartet's Frammenti (2001, Il Manifesto), with drummer Fabrizio Sferra. In 2003 he guested on guitarist Bebo Ferra's Mari Pintau, alongside saxophonist Javier Girotto, and the same year sang on oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil's Morton's Foot. The Abou-Khalil connection lasted: German Wikipedia calls Murgia a member of his band, he is billed on the 2012 World Village album Hungry People, which also features accordionist Luciano Biondini, tuba player Michel Godard and percussionist Jarrod Cagwin, and he appears on Abou-Khalil's The Flood and the Fate of the Fish (2019, Enja) on soprano saxophone, voice and launeddas. In parallel came a sequence of sessions with the Italian pop and song world: Vinicio Capossela's 2006 tour album, Massimo Ranieri's Accussì Grande (2005), and Al Di Meola and Andrea Parodi's Midsummer Night in Sardinia (2004), on which he plays alto saxophone and launeddas.

The most durable relationship is with Michel Godard, the French serpent and tuba player. Their duo album Deep (2007, Intuition) pairs Murgia's soprano saxophone and voice with Godard's serpent and tuba, and Murgia then appears on Godard's Le Concert des Parfums (2009), the Monteverdi project A Trace of Grace (2011), and the live vinyl Soyeusement - Live in Noirlac (2012, billed with Steve Swallow, Bruno Helstroffer and Fanny Paccoud). Godard is also in the groups Murgia leads under his own name, apart from Blast: the quintet Megalitico 5tet (2009, Mankosa), with Biondini on accordion, drummer Pietro Iodice and vibraphonist Franck Tortiller; the Gavino Murgia Trio's L'Ultima Mattanza (2014, Quinton), with drummer Patrice Héral, an album about the tuna-fishing tradition of Carloforte on San Pietro island; and Megalitico 4tet - Endless (2017, Abeat), with Biondini and Héral, recorded in April 2014 at Funtàna Buddìa Studio in Nuoro and containing readings of John Coltrane's "India" and Miles Davis's "All Blues". Musica Jazz's review of Endless by Bazzurro in February 2018 called its jazz matrix more marked than in Murgia's earlier work and heard Liebman-like inflections in his soprano saxophone.

Two other collaborations put him at the center of Sardinian jazz. Giornale di Bordo (2010, Sardmusic), recorded in Cagliari from February 15 to 17, 2010, is a quartet with pianist and accordionist Antonello Salis, prepared-guitar player Paolo Angeli and drummer Hamid Drake, on which Murgia plays saxophone and flute and sings bassu. He is also the sole saxophonist on the 2018 Abeat album Blast by his Blast 4tet, an all-acoustic quartet with trombonist Mauro Ottolini, bassist Aldo Vigorito and drummer Pietro Iodice. It opens with Charles Mingus's "Pithecanthropus Erectus", followed by seven Murgia originals, and was reviewed on All About Jazz by Neri Pollastri. A photograph from the INNtöne Jazz Festival in Austria in June 2019 shows the quartet sharing a stage with Tenores de Gòine, which is the two halves of his work in one frame.

Later releases keep the range wide. Officium Divinum (2016, E Lucevan Le Stelle) reworks the Garbarek and Hilliard Ensemble album Officium with the early-music vocal group Cantar Lontano under Marco Mencoboni, with Murgia on soprano saxophone; Sabir (2019, Visage Music) is a jazz and world-fusion record with Luca Curcio's Free Humans; and Veste Rosa (2024, Casa Editions) is a quintet programme of Verdi with trumpeter Flavio Boltro, pianist Fabio Giachino, bassist Davide Liberti and singer Giuliano D'Amico. He also plays on Enrico Intra's Gregoriani & Spirituals (2018), where he is credited on the track "Intrònnias" with Tenores de Gòine, and on "Moto Perpetuo", a track on a 2012 volume of Paolo Fresu's Cinquant'Anni Suonati series, credited with Fresu and Bebo Ferra. Away from records, regional press describes him as a guest soloist with the student Azuni Jazz Orchestra in Sassari, directed by Dante Casu and Roberto Mura.

Whether Murgia counts as a jazz artist or a world-music one is a fair question, and the record answers it mostly in jazz's favor. His four leader albums are Discogs-tagged Jazz, his sideman work is largely in jazz bands (Abou-Khalil, Godard, Salis, Boltro), and jazz press treats him as a jazz leader; against that, several credits sit outside jazz: the Capossela and Ranieri sessions, the Kenze Neke rock album, Sardinian folk anthologies, and Officium Divinum, which Discogs files as classical choral music. He belongs in a jazz catalog because Sardinian material is structural to his music rather than decorative.

Murgia's sound is defined by two things kept in contact. On soprano saxophone reviewers hear an expressive, Liebman-like line; on tenor and baritone he works in a more conventional jazz register. Around that he layers instruments and techniques from Sardinia: the launeddas and the sulittos, flutes (a Sardinian profile says he builds launeddas and ethnic flutes himself), and above all the guttural bass voice of the tenore. His own groups pair him with tuba, serpent, accordion, trombone and percussion, with no piano or guitar, so harmony is often carried by low brass, accordion and voice. His repertoire runs from his own compositions, with titles such as "Intro 'e Montes", "Gorropu" and "L'Ultima Mattanza", through Coltrane, Miles Davis and Mingus to Monteverdi and Verdi. His first jazz concert, at eleven, was a Paul Motian quartet, and among the jazz musicians he is documented as playing with are Mal Waldron, Roswell Rudd and Gianluigi Trovesi, per his biographies; those are performance connections listed in his press biographies, not recording credits.