Marco Zurzolo was born in Naples on July 26, 1962, and trained at the city's Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella, where he took diplomas in flute, jazz arrangement and jazz saxophone. Music ran in the family: his older brother, double bassist Rino Zurzolo (1958-2017), built his own jazz and fusion career working with Pino Daniele from 1977 to 2001 and was voted best Italian double bass player by Guitar Club magazine in 1990. The two brothers appear together on record at least once, on Rino's 1990 album Fuorlovado, and Marco has continued to honor Rino's memory since his 2017 death with a touring tribute concert, "Rino," first staged at Naples's Teatro San Ferdinando and still being performed and broadcast as recently as August 2024 (Rai Radio Live Napoli); a live recording of the project is on Spotify.

Zurzolo began his own compositional and discographic career in 1995 and has since released albums distributed across Europe and Canada. His catalog runs in two overlapping directions. One is a sustained project fusing Neapolitan song and folk instrumentation with jazz, opening with Polvere di Napoli (1998, PoloSud) and continuing through Napoli, Ventre del Sud (2001) and Pulcinella (2002), both credited to Marco Zurzolo, Banda M.V.M. and released on the Turin jazz label EGEA. The other runs through the Itinera label from the 2010s onward: the soundtrack album Il Discorso del Re (2012), composed for a stage production starring Luca Barbareschi and Filippo Dini; Chiamate Napoli... 081 (2015); Vesuviana (2019), a duo record with bassist Davide Costagliola; and I Suoni del Commissario Ricciardi (2021), music built around Maurizio de Giovanni's Neapolitan detective novels, a connection Zurzolo has carried onto the concert stage in a recurring live program with de Giovanni himself, including a September 2026 performance at the Pomigliano Jazz festival.

Zurzolo's most significant Discogs-documented jazz credits come from two sessions cut only months apart in 2005 for EGEA and Itinera. On his own leader date 7 E Mezzo (EGEA), he is joined by clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi and American bassist Marc Johnson, a Bill Evans Trio alumnus. The same year, as one-fifth of the Mitchell-Zurzolo-Moye Quintet, he recorded Samsara (Itinera) alongside two founding members of Chicago's Art Ensemble of Chicago, reedman Roscoe Mitchell and drummer Famoudou Don Moye, with trombonist Alessandro Tedesco and bassist Aldo Vigorito completing the group; All About Jazz reviewed the record. Zurzolo also has a Discogs-confirmed guest credit on soprano saxophone on guitarist Antonio Onorato's 'E scelle (2021). Separately, a well-documented live pairing with saxophonist Archie Shepp took place on September 6, 2008, at the Ischia Jazz Festival, where the two performed Zurzolo's own composition "Torno a Sud" (from 7 E Mezzo) together; this is a reported concert, not a studio session, so it is treated here as press-documented rather than Discogs-verified. Zurzolo's own booking biography, published by Itinera, additionally names Chet Baker, Joe Lovano, Omar Sosa, Richard Galliano, Rita Marley, Van Morrison, Solomon Burke and Billy Preston among his collaborators; none of these is tied to a specific indexed recording, so they are noted here as unverified biographical claims rather than confirmed credits.

Alongside his own projects, Zurzolo has built a long parallel career as a session and touring saxophonist in Neapolitan popular song, with Discogs-documented studio credits going back to the early 1980s on records by Pino Daniele, Gino Paoli, Nino Buonocore, Roberto Murolo, Gigi D'Alessio, Peppe Barra and Carmelo Zappulla, and later appearances with Daniele Sepe's Rote Jazz Fraktion and on Antonio Onorato's discography (see above). He composes for cinema, theater and television, including the Rai fiction series I Bastardi di Pizzofalcone and the film In punta di piedi, and has received the Ministero della Cultura's Quality Prize for his compositions. He teaches Jazz Ensemble Music at the Salerno Conservatory, after earlier teaching saxophone at the conservatories of Naples, Avellino, Ferrara and Rovigo, and since 2012 has run ZTL - Zurzolo Teatro Live, a Naples performance and exhibition space.

Zurzolo describes his own artistic path as built on "the recovery of Southern tradition within the world of jazz," and his discography bears that out literally: Napoli, Ventre del Sud and Pulcinella pair his alto saxophone and flute with accordion, bouzouki, oud, didgeridoo, mandolin and an array of hand percussion (tam-tam, caxixi, tabla), a Mediterranean-folk instrumentation wrapped around jazz structure and improvisation rather than a jazz combo with folk color added on top. That fusion project sits alongside more conventional small-group jazz dates - Chiamate Napoli... 081 and Vesuviana are built on standard alto sax, piano or bass, and drums lineups - and alongside his one avant-garde outlier, Samsara, a free-jazz-tagged session with two Art Ensemble of Chicago veterans. Discogs' own genre tags for his catalog span "Jazz" and "Folk, World & Country" on most of his leader work, with a single "Hip Hop" tag on a 2016 guest feature (Tueff's "Ogni Vota") showing how far his session work ranges outside jazz entirely. That range is also visible in his extensive outside work backing Neapolitan popular singers, a parallel career that runs the length of his discography rather than a phase he moved past.