Marco Centasso was born in Venice in 1992 and started on piano before moving to electric bass and then double bass, the instrument he ultimately built a jazz career on. He earned his jazz double bass diploma in 2020 from the Conservatorio di Vicenza "Arrigo Pedrollo," where he also studied German bow technique with Gergely Jardanyi.

His first working group was the trio Ophir, formed in 2013 inside the Elettrofoscari project at Ca' Foscari University in Venice with alto saxophonist Jacopo Giacomoni and drummer Raul Catalano. Ophir released its self-titled debut album on May 31, 2017, blending free jazz, post-rock and noise, and went on to play the Sile Jazz, Roccella Jazz, Novara Jazz and Sibiu Jazz Festivals. In 2016 he co-founded the Vicenza-based quintet RAME with vocalist Valentina Fin, saxophonist Giovanni Fochesato, pianist Mauro Spano and drummer Filippo Mampreso, a project setting jazz to Italian-language texts. RAME's self-titled debut came out April 30, 2018 on Emme Record Label and won third prize at the 2018 Jazz Juniors competition in Krakow, followed by a second album, Oscura Era, on Wow Records in 2021. Since 2016 he has also been a member of the Chironomids Outerspace Group, composer Giovanni Mancuso's contemporary-music ensemble, performing at Venice's Teatro Malibran and Treviso's Teatro Comunale, and he has played the Venice Biennale and worked with the Venice Conservatory.

Centasso's individual profile rose through Italy's young-talent circuit: he won the 2020 "Orchestra Aperta, la conduzione chironomica" competition run by Fondazione Musica per Roma and SIAE, and in 2021 was selected for the Orchestra Nazionale Jazz Giovani Talenti, touring with the group to Umbria Jazz, JAZZMI, Rome's Casa del Jazz and France's Nantes Jazz Festival. He has also performed at the Sibiu Jazz Festival in Romania, the Nis Jazz Festival in Serbia and Cracow's Jazz Juniors festival in Poland.

He released his debut album as a bandleader, Hidden Rooms, on Parco della Musica Records on October 28, 2022, recorded the previous July at Cat Sound Studio in Badia Polesine with the Marco Centasso Quartet: pianist Giovanni Mancuso, bass clarinetist Alberto Collodel and drummer Raul Catalano. The album's nine tracks are structured around a recurring dream of empty attic-like rooms, with individual compositions drawing on subjects ranging from dream theory and darkroom photography ("Contenuto Latente") to octopus cognition ("Octopus Ecstasy"), Parkinson's disease ("Miss Tremors") and Venetian history ("Metamauco"). Musica Jazz magazine ranked him among Italy's top ten emerging jazz talents in 2022 and placed him fourth in the same ranking in 2023.

In 2024 he was selected by the WeStart production center at Novara Jazz and by the Nuova Generazione Jazz initiative, support that fed into his second album, Um/Welt, released on Parco della Musica Records on May 9, 2025. Built around biologist Jakob von Uexkull's concept of the umwelt, the subjective sensory world each organism inhabits, the record pairs Centasso's double bass with Sarra Douik's vocals and oud, Manuel Caliumi's saxophone and bass clarinet, and Riccardo Sellan's electronics, alternating English, Arabic and invented languages across eight tracks. The same year, he recorded double bass on pianist Lorenzo Liuzzi's debut album as a bandleader, The Door Ajar (2025, Dodicilune), alongside drummer Raul Catalano.

Centasso's own artist biography also names performances and study alongside Evan Parker, Amir ElSaffar, Pauline Oliveros, Alex Sipiagin and Paolo Damiani; none of these collaborations is yet documented in his Discogs credit history.

Centasso works at the intersection of composed jazz and free improvisation, describing his own writing as treating "rhythm as protagonist." His music draws as much on non-musical sources as on other players: Hidden Rooms grew out of dream imagery, darkroom photography and reading that includes Oliver Sacks, Donna Haraway and James Bridle, while Um/Welt is built on a biological concept of perception and sets acoustic double bass against Riccardo Sellan's electronic manipulation and Sarra Douik's oud and multilingual vocals. He names minimalist composer Steve Reich among his influences, alongside a wider range running from John Cage to contemporary composition, and favors improvisation within composed structures rather than treating the two as opposites. His earliest ensemble, Ophir, worked at the rawer end of that same spectrum, closer to free jazz, post-rock and noise than to the more electronics-inflected, chamber-scaled sound of his solo-leader albums.