Matt  Johns is Cornish born and bred.  

From an early age he had a passion for music. He would spend endless hours listening to Jazz ,as his musical family background was highly influenced by the genre. This love of music began as a listener, when Jazz greats such as Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, Jimmy Smith and Bill Evans' inspired him. His aspiration was to follow in the footsteps of his heroes and pursue the practice and creativity of the music in a professional context. 

From the age of 13, Matthew started taking classical piano lessons as he wanted to be able to understand and achieve the technique and discipline of performance and aural perception. Playing, learning theory, and continuing to listen and study the context of classical music helped him to achieve a more intuitive understanding of music. Having this basic classical grounding and enabled him to build a foundation and structure for the theory and performance of Jazz. Around the age of 14 Matthew achieved a Grade 6 Classical Piano and Grade 5 Theory. During this time he performed as a classical soloist on a number of occasions. Some of these performances have included Recital Evenings and annual concerts with his classical piano teacher.  

Matthew has had many opportunities to play Jazz piano to many types of audiences with various sized outfits. For four years he played piano and keyboard in the Cornwall Youth Jazz Orchestra (C.Y.J.O) which was very enjoyable and gained him experience of playing in a big band situation. This was a great opportunity to develop and improve his improvisation skills. 

During the conversion from secondary school to college, Matthew generated a love for film and, unfortunately at the time, ended the path to music and took up Film Studies at college. 

Throughout this time he gained many skills in film and the media, completing this course he chose to follow upon a degree in the film trade, which took him to Bristol University.

This year living on his own and having time to think, Matthew came to his senses and decided that this love for film was from imagination and wasn’t desired from the back lot, so he terminated his study in film.  

Matthew, being honest to himself, decided that music was the desired path and chose to come back home to study music at jazz degree level.

By this time it had been three years with out any form of playing and he knew it was going to be hard, but he has found the way and from that starting the Jazz degree this September Matthew was happy to have found his feet and eager to get underway.