Mattia Cigalini is an alto and soprano saxophonist born June 9, 1989, in Ponte dell'Olio, a small town in the province of Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna. He began performing publicly at age 12 and trained in classical saxophone at the Conservatorio "Giuseppe Nicolini" in Piacenza, graduating with top marks. In 2008 he won the Luciano Zorzella National Award as best new talent and the International Massimo Urbani Award, and that year released his first record as a leader, the trio session 3 for E, which drew early attention from Italian and international jazz press including Jazzit, Jazz Hot and Musica Jazz.

His breakthrough came in 2009 with Arriving Soon, a quintet date for the Japanese label Norma Blu with a Discogs-confirmed frontline of trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso, pianist Andrea Pozza, bassist Riccardo Fioravanti and drummer Tullio De Piscopo. The album toured Japan that October and was singled out by Swing Journal among the year's notable jazz releases. Cigalini returned to the studio as a leader with Res Nova (2011, My Favorite Records), a trio session with bassist Yuri Goloubev, drummer Tony Arco and pianist Mario Zara that was presented at the Umbria Jazz Festival.

Through the early 2010s he worked across several co-billed small-group projects, recording Italian Melodies in Jazz (2010) with guitarist Luigi Tessarollo's quartet and Initiation (2014, Abeat Records) with the Cigalini Tessarollo Dalla Porta Roche Quartet, a session reviewed on All About Jazz. He signed with C.A.M. Jazz for a run of leader albums: Beyond (2013), a quartet record with guitarist Bebo Ferra that reworked pop material by artists including Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Shakira alongside originals, presented at Germany's Münster jazz festival; Right Now (2015), a duo album with pianist Enrico Zanisi; and Astrea (2015), a trio record with drummer Nicola Angelucci and pianist Gianluca Di Ienno. In 2016 Cigalini signed to Verve Records (Universal Music Italia) for Adamas, a quartet album of standards and originals recorded at Cat Sound Studio in Badia Polesine and released April 1, 2016, drawing on repertoire including "Lullaby of Birdland," "Sentimental Journey" and Thelonious Monk's "Ask Me Now."

The same year he recorded Three Generations (2016, Alfa Music), a co-billed trio session, Discogs-confirmed, with pianist Enrico Intra and bassist Paolino Dalla Porta, and appeared as alto saxophonist on the Riccardo Brazzale-led Lydian Sound Orchestra's Music For Lonely Lovers (2016, Almarecords), a big-band project he had also been a member of earlier in his career. His playing was singled out in Musica Jazz's Top Jazz 2016 annual critics' poll, whose companion compilation album Cigalini appears on. He is also a Discogs-confirmed member of the Giovanni Tommaso Consonanti Quartet, alongside bassist and bandleader Giovanni Tommaso, drummer Nicola Angelucci and pianist Zanisi, which recorded Conversation With My Soul (2014, Parco Della Musica Records), reviewed on All About Jazz. More recently he has appeared as a featured guest on Giovanni Sanguineti Nextrio's Remember The Future (2020, Da Vinci Jazz) and on vocalist Giuliano Ligabue's EP This Happy Rhythm (2020).

Alongside performing, Cigalini has built a career around his hometown region: since 2013 he has been artistic director of the Val Luretta Jazz Festival in Agazzano, and since 2019 he has taught jazz saxophone at his own alma mater, the Conservatorio "Giuseppe Nicolini" in Piacenza. In 2016 he was elected mayor of Agazzano, a town of roughly 2,000 people, a role he has described as growing out of a sense of belonging to the area rather than prior political ambition; he served until 2021. In 2017 he also founded Cigalini Music S.r.l., a company producing saxophones and other wind instruments under the name "Sound E-Motion." His own promotional biography additionally credits him with festival and stage appearances alongside American musicians including Tom Harrell, Uri Caine, Randy Brecker, Stefano Bollani and Paolo Fresu, and with a 2013 guest appearance with the Mingus Big Band at New York's Jazz Standard; none of these has a specific Discogs recording credit tied to Cigalini, so they are reported here as stated in his own biography rather than independently verified.

Cigalini is a straight-ahead, standards-grounded alto and soprano saxophonist whose leader albums move between original small-group writing (Res Nova, Astrea, the Right Now duo with Zanisi) and repertoire-based projects: Adamas sets his own tunes alongside jazz standards such as "Lullaby of Birdland" and Monk's "Ask Me Now," while Beyond takes the opposite route, applying a mainstream jazz-quartet treatment to contemporary pop songs by Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Shakira, Jennifer Lopez and Black Eyed Peas. That range, together with his work inside larger ensembles like the Lydian Sound Orchestra and the Giovanni Tommaso Consonanti Quartet, situates him as a conservatory-trained mainstream jazz voice equally comfortable leading small groups and working as a section or guest player within bigger, more arranged settings.