Gianluigi Trovesi grew up around rhythm before melody. His father played drums as an amateur, and Gianluigi started on percussion himself before switching to clarinet and going on to study harmony and counterpoint under Vittorio Fellegara. He turned professional in the early 1960s, playing live and teaching music in a primary school before joining the Franco Cerri Quintet from 1974 to 1976 and working alongside pianist Giorgio Gaslini.

1978 was the year that set his direction. Trovesi released his debut album as a leader, Baghèt, named for a nearly-extinct bagpipe specific to the valleys around Bergamo. The record set Ars Nova and serialist classical writing next to Sardinian launeddas and Bergamo folk material, all inside a jazz-improvisation frame, and won him the Italian Critics' National Prize that same year. He also won the RAI TV National Competition for Saxophone and Clarinet in 1978, which led to a permanent job in the Milan Radio Big Band that lasted until 1993.

The connections kept compounding. After a concert in Bergamo with Giorgio Gaslini's Sextet, the influential European producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt invited Trovesi into his Clarinet Summit production, an all-star group of clarinet soloists that also included John Carter, Perry Robinson, Theo Jörgensmann, and Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky. In 1979, he became a founding member of the Italian jazz scene's international wing, later joining Enrico Rava's quartet in 1979 as well, a connection that has continued across decades of European jazz.

1991 was the next hinge point. Trovesi became a founding member of the Italian Instabile Orchestra and formed his own Octet in the same year, an ensemble built with trumpeter Pino Minafra to run jazz language directly into Italian folk material and European classical writing. The Octet's debut, From G to G (1992), won the Italian Top Jazz poll and earned DownBeat's five-star rating, with critics comparing it to David Murray's and Henry Threadgill's ensembles while still calling the result "a real Italian jazz." The Octet's Les Hommes Armés (1996) was voted Best Record of the Year and the group Best Italian Jazz Group in the Musica Jazz Top Jazz Poll; Trovesi had already been voted the poll's Best Musician in 1988.

His longest-running duo project is with accordionist Gianni Coscia, recording together since 1995's Radici and moving to ECM Records for 1999's In cerca di cibo. Novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco wrote the liner notes for three consecutive Trovesi/Coscia ECM albums: In cerca di cibo, 2005's Round About Weill, and 2011's Frère Jacques – Round About Offenbach. Eco described the duo's Kurt Weill reinterpretations as unfolding "in a musical drowse dominated by an almost oneiric principle of contamination." A fourth duo album, 2019's La Misteriosa Musica Della Regina Loana, was dedicated to Eco directly, drawing its title and themes from his 2004 novel.

Trovesi has continued working steadily into his ninth decade: Stravaganze Consonanti (2023, ECM), a collaboration with baroque violinist and conductor Stefano Montanari exploring Renaissance and baroque repertoire on period instruments, and Old And New Dances (2024), a reunion with bassist Paolo Damiani and drummer Ettore Fioravanti, the same trio configuration that made 1985's Dances, recorded together again 40 years later at Casa del Jazz in Rome.

Trovesi's signature move, established on his 1978 debut and never abandoned, is treating Italian regional folk material (Bergamo's baghèt bagpipe tradition, Sardinian launeddas, banda wind-orchestra writing) as source material worth the same serious compositional attention as jazz improvisation or European classical form. Critics have specifically traced Ars Nova and serialist technique (Schoenberg-adjacent 20th-century classical writing) through his early work, and opera and Verdi specifically through 2008's Profumo Di Violetta, recorded with the characteristic North-Italian "banda" wind orchestra.

His most consistent working relationship, the ECM duo with accordionist Gianni Coscia, is built on a chamber-jazz intimacy that reviewers have described as roving between jazz and chamber music, folk and soundtrack music, with a hint of klezmer. The two-reed and two-instrument formats he favors (the Coscia duo, the earlier trio recordings) sit deliberately apart from the larger-ensemble writing of the Octet and Nonet, giving him two distinct registers: intimate and orchestral.