Luca Bulgarelli was born in Abruzzo, Italy, in 1972. He began on electric bass before moving to double bass, and continued his studies at the Accademia Musicale Pescarese. In 1992 he won a scholarship to the Siena Jazz seminars, and in February 1994, while still a student, he shared a Pescara stage with the American composer and arranger Gunther Schuller. He also worked in saxophonist Pietro Tonolo's quintet early in his career. He graduated in double bass from the Conservatorio di Campobasso in 1997.

Bulgarelli built his career as one of Rome's most in-demand jazz bassists rather than as a leader in his own right. His most frequent working relationships have been with pianist Claudio Filippini and drummer Marcello Di Leonardo, whose trio he has anchored on bass across three C.A.M. Jazz albums: The Enchanted Garden (2011), Squaring The Circle (2015) and Before The Wind (2018). He has also held long-running chairs in drummer Roberto Gatto's bands (Plays Rugantino, 2000; Traps, 2007, which he also mixed; Pure Imagination, 2011; Nino!, 2016), in pianist Enrico Pieranunzi's groups (from 2002's One Lone Star through the Enrico Pieranunzi Jazz Ensemble's Time's Passage in 2020 and the trio-and-orchestra recordings Blues & Bach in 2023 and Improclassica in 2025), and alongside trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso, with whom he has recorded on electric and double bass since 2006's Trumpet Legacy (with fellow trumpeter Flavio Boltro), through You've Changed (2007), the Bosso/Javier Girotto Latin Mood project's Sol (2008) and Vamos (2011), and Quattro + Quattro (2013).

He was a formal member of singer Maria Pia De Vito's group Songs From The Underground, playing electric and double bass, mixing and producing the band's Mind The Gap (2009, EmArcy/Universal), and he was the bassist on pianist Kekko Fornarelli's breakthrough trio record Room of Mirrors (2011, Auand, billed as Kekko Fornarelli Kube), an Esbjörn Svensson tribute that drew notice from The Guardian, Jazzwise and All About Jazz. In 2024 he played double bass on trumpeter Paolo Fresu's contribution to pianist Yelena Eckemoff's Romance of the Moon, a suite of thirteen pieces set to poems by Federico García Lorca. Other credit-level jazz collaborations include guitarist Battista Lena (I Cosmonauti Russi, 2002; Mi Ami?, 2013), a mixing and mastering credit for guitarist Bebo Ferra's Lights (2023), and double bass and a mastering credit on saxophonist Gegè Telesforo's Big Mama Legacy (2024).

His closest approach to a leader date is a small run of equally-billed trio albums: Triplets (2018, Albore Jazz), a standards set with drummer Amedeo Ariano and pianist/vocalist Francesca Tandoi that Bulgarelli also mixed and mastered, and Glauco Plays Paolo (2023, EGEA), on which he and electric bassist Daniele Mencarelli split double-bass and electric-bass duties in drummer Glauco Di Sabatino's trio performing his brother Paolo Di Sabatino's compositions.

Beyond jazz, Bulgarelli has built a long-running parallel career in Italian popular music, most notably as bassist on eight studio albums by singer-songwriter Sergio Cammariere between 2001 and 2025, and with other credits for Francesco De Gregori, Daniele Silvestri, Ivano Fossati and Beppe Servillo. He teaches jazz double bass, electric bass and ensemble playing, having held posts at the L'Aquila Conservatory "Alfredo Casella" (2013-2019) and at Rome's Saint Louis College of Music (2016-2024); his teaching has more recently been listed at the Conservatorio Pietro Mascagni.

Bulgarelli is a standards-literate, acoustic-toned bassist whose reputation rests on being the trusted rhythm-section anchor for some of Rome's most established jazz leaders rather than on a solo voice of his own. Musicians who have hired him repeatedly describe a "craftsman-like" approach: a full, centered double-bass sound that supports a pianist's or trumpeter's phrasing without asserting itself, matched with real facility on electric bass for the pop and fusion-adjacent sessions that make up a second strand of his work. That range, moving between post-bop piano trios, straight-ahead horn-led groups and Sergio Cammariere's more song-based, jazz-inflected pop, has made him a first-call player across genres in the Rome studio and live scene for three decades.