Marco Bardoscia was born December 18, 1982, in Salento, the southern tip of Puglia, into a family where a grandfather who built instruments and played guitar and mandolin kept music in the house. He started on guitar at ten, but within months had switched to electric bass, and a chance hearing of a double-bass solo on a Jazz Renegades record settled the rest of it. At fifteen he enrolled in the double bass class at the "Tito Schipa" Conservatory in Lecce, graduating in 2005 under Leonardo Presicci, and he holds a second diploma in jazz from the "N. Rota" Conservatory in Monopoli. In 2002 he attended the Umbria Jazz clinics and won the Berklee College of Music talent prize in Boston; in 2006 he won the Jimmy Woode Award for best double bassist at the Ronciglione Jazz Festival.

His debut as a leader, Opening (2007, Jazz Engine), drew on the Salento scene around him: saxophonist Raffaele Casarano, drummer Dario Congedo, guitarist Alberto Parmegiani, trombonist Gianluca Petrella, flugelhornist Andrea Sabatino and percussionist Alessandro Monteduro, all Discogs-credited on the record. A second leader album, The Dreamer (2011, My Favorite Records, a Milan label run by Patrizio Romano and distributed by EMI), followed four years later; period press describes the band as trumpeter Luca Aquino, saxophonist Raffaele Casarano and pianist William Greco, though Discogs itself lists no extraartists for this specific release.

Bardoscia also spent seven years living in Brussels, engaging with the Belgian jazz scene, before his career deepened back home around Puglia's Nàdan/Casarano circle and the Puglia Jazz Factory collective, appearing across a run of Discogs-verified sideman dates through the early 2010s.

2016 was his busiest year on record. Trigono (Tǔk Music), billed to BAM - Bardoscia, the string ensemble Quartetto Alborada, and pianist Rita Marcotulli - features Paolo Fresu on piano and handclaps and Maria Pia De Vito on voice, both Discogs-credited guests, alongside French-Vietnamese guitarist Nguyên Lê. The same year he released Tutti Solo (Off), a solo double bass record, Discogs-tagged Avant-Garde Jazz, and joined vocalist Boris Savoldelli and saxophonist Raffaele Casarano as an equal third of Savoldelli/Casarano/Bardoscia for The Great Jazz Gig In The Sky (MoonJune Records), a track-by-track jazz reimagining of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon.

Bardoscia's relationship with Fresu's Tǔk Music label became the throughline of the years that followed: Altissima Luce: Laudario Di Cortona (XIII Sec.) (2018, Amadeus), a Fresu-led setting of a 13th-century Italian devotional songbook with bandoneonist Daniele Di Bonaventura, drummer Michele Rabbia, the Orchestra Da Camera Di Perugia and the Gruppo Vocale Armoniosoincanto; and Tempo Di Chet (2018, Tǔk Music), a genuine trio billing with Fresu and pianist Dino Rubino paying tribute to Chet Baker, a record that has since drawn several million Spotify streams. His own The Future Is A Tree (2020, Tǔk Music) - a trio with pianist William Greco and Congedo back on drums, its cover a sculpture by Paola Pezzi - was his first true leader date for the label. He appears again on Fresu and Cristina Zavalloni's ensemble record PopOFF! (2021, Tǔk Music), a jazz reworking of the Zecchino d'Oro children's-song-contest repertoire alongside reed player Cristiano Arcelli, Rubino and Quartetto Alborada, and returned to Rubino's own trio, alongside drummer Stefano Bagnoli, for Solitude (2024, Tǔk Music).

His most recent album as a leader, Legno madre (2023, Tǔk Music), is a quintet-plus-Orchestra Da Camera Di Perugia project produced for the label by Fresu, built around the idea that every instrument on the record, starting with Bardoscia's own double bass, is made of wood; concert listings for the project credit clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi as a featured guest, though Discogs itself carries no extraartists for this release. In 2023 he also played electric bass on "Arise," a track from Nicola Conte's Umoja (Far Out Recordings), and he remains a member of the long-running world-jazz group Ragini Trio, whose Peace The New Jazz (2019, W.E.R.F.) added guests Bojan Z and Sawani Mudgal and whose most recent record, 3, was released in 2026. By his own label's account he has played more than a thousand concerts across four continents.

Bardoscia's catalogue runs between two poles: the stripped-down intimacy of an unaccompanied double bass record (Tutti Solo) and large, arranged settings built around strings, orchestra or an ensemble cast (Trigono, Altissima Luce, Legno madre). Running through both is the Salento folk idiom he grew up inside, which he has described working to "remix" with his own musical language rather than simply quote, an ethno-jazz sensibility that surfaces most directly on his own leader dates. His broader profile has been shaped by his standing inside Paolo Fresu's Tǔk Music circle, where he has worked as a genuine co-leader (the Tempo Di Chet trio), a credited sideman on Fresu's own large-ensemble projects, and a leader in his own right, and by a genuine appetite for unlikely repertoire, from a Pink Floyd album reimagined as a jazz "trialogue" to a set of Italian children's television songs reworked for strings and horns.