Matthew Halsall was born in Manchester on September 11, 1983, and grew up in the north of England. His father taught art and his mother ran businesses, among them a shop called Gondwana that imported clothing and furniture from around the world, the name he later gave his record label. He started on cornet at six, when his parents began taking him to Sunday afternoon jazz sessions at The Mill at the Pier in Wigan, and moved to trumpet at twelve, once his hands were big enough, joining a local youth big band as its youngest member. As a young teenager he attended masterclasses at the same venue given by visiting trumpeters including Roy Hargrove, Maynard Ferguson and Bobby Shew.

Severely dyslexic, he struggled at school until his mid teens, when he entered the Maharishi School, where he practised yoga and Transcendental Meditation and where each day began with sun salutations. Around the age of fourteen or fifteen he started going to Mr Scruff's club nights, and at one of them he heard the DJ play Pharoah Sanders's "You've Got to Have Freedom" from Journey to the One. He went looking for every Sanders record he could find and, through them, reached Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda (Impulse!, 1971), the record that led him to put harp and tambura on his own albums. He later studied sound engineering and production at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, then settled in Manchester, where he spent his evenings at Matt & Phred's Jazz Club listening to local players including saxophonists Nat Birchall, Chip Wickham and John Ellis, bassist Phil France and drummer Luke Flowers.

With about 1,000 pounds saved, Halsall decided in 2007 to start his own label rather than fit his music into what existing labels were releasing. Gondwana Records, founded in Manchester in 2008 with his brother Daniel Halsall, a graphic designer and artist who makes the label's artwork, issued Sending My Love (2008) as its first release, a collective date with Wickham, Birchall, pianist Adam Fairhall, bassist Gavin Barras and drummer Gaz Hughes. Colour Yes (2009) used a septet with two drummers and harpist Rachael Gladwin. His third album, On the Go (April 2011), a sextet date in modal post-bop, won a Gilles Peterson Worldwide Award for best jazz album and brought a nomination in the best jazz act category at the 2011 MOBO Awards. Fletcher Moss Park (2012) added chamber strings, and in 2013 Bonobo chose its track "Sailing Out to Sea," one of two pieces on which Halsall does not play, for his Late Night Tales compilation.

He then formed the Gondwana Orchestra, a larger ensemble that added bansuri flute and koto, and recorded When the World Was One (2014), named iTunes Jazz Album of the Year for 2014, and Into Forever (2015), with strings, alongside a split single of two Alice Coltrane pieces, "Journey in Satchidananda" and "Blue Nile." Around then he also contributed the composition "The Games We Played" to singer Zara McFarlane's If You Knew Her and played trumpet on three tracks of Mr Scruff's Friendly Bacteria (2014), and in 2016 he is the featured trumpeter on "Ashes to Oceans" from DJ Shadow's The Mountain Will Fall. Touring Into Forever with eleven to thirteen musicians left him exhausted, and he put his own albums aside for five years to concentrate on the label. In that time he produced and played on Inspirations (2017), recorded in Manchester with the Los Angeles vocalist Dwight Trible, and released Oneness (2019), a three-LP set of his own recordings made in 2008 with his first band.

By 2018 most of his longtime band had moved away from the north of England, so Halsall recruited a new group of Manchester players by late 2019. Salute to the Sun (November 20, 2020), built around ecology and harmony with nature, was their debut, with flutist and saxophonist Matt Cliffe, harpist Maddie Herbert, pianist Liviu Gheorghe, drummer Alan Taylor, percussionist Jack McCarthy and Barras, the one holdover from the earlier band. A live recording of the band, made at Manchester's Hallé St Peter's on November 25, 2020 for the charity Mind, was released in December 2021, and the EPs The Temple Within and Changing Earth appeared in 2022. An Ever Changing View (September 8, 2023) layers tuned percussion, loops and samples over acoustic arrangements; in September 2023 Halsall headlined London's Royal Albert Hall with a septet. The EP Bright Sparkling Light, first sold at his 2023 shows, reached streaming services in 2024. He has continued to produce for the label: Discogs credits him as producer of Wickham's The Eternal Now (2025) and of the Ancient Infinity Orchestra's It's Always About Liberation (2026). As of 2026 he is based in Manchester, and the label's own pages list him among its artists alongside Hania Rani, Jasmine Myra and Svaneborg Kardyb.

Halsall's music grows out of the modal and spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Miles Davis, whom he studied closely as a teenager along with Chet Baker; he has said he worked out all of Davis's solos on Kind of Blue and played along with the record. His other touchstones include Yusef Lateef's Eastern Sounds and Clifford Jordan's Glass Bead Games (Strata-East, 1974), both introduced to him by Nat Birchall, and the Cinematic Orchestra's Every Day (Ninja Tune, 2002). What he adds is the sample-based electronica and DJ culture he grew up around, plus instruments not usually heard in jazz: harp, koto, bansuri, tambura, strings, and a growing kit of tuned percussion (kalimba, glockenspiel, celeste, chimes, custom-made bells) that dominates An Ever Changing View. His playing and writing favor a meditative, understated manner, and he composes at the piano, either very early in the morning or late at night, a habit he links to the brighter and darker halves of his catalogue. AllMusic's Thom Jurek describes him as one of the leading figures of the British jazz scene, and Big Issue credited him and Gondwana with helping widen the audience for a more contemplative, spiritual strain of jazz. Through the label he has also launched or backed Manchester and northern acts such as GoGo Penguin, Mammal Hands, Portico Quartet and Nat Birchall.