Jazz Articles about Matt Choboter

About Matt Choboter

Album Review

Matt Choboter: Visceral Totems: Improvisations for Microtonal Prepared Piano

Read "Visceral Totems: Improvisations for Microtonal Prepared Piano" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
September 19, 2026

Conceived and executed as an extended aural narrative performed on a custom-built microtonal prepared piano, Matt Choboter's Visceral Totems: Improvisations for Microtonal Prepared Piano radiates an orchestral air from its very inception via “Prologue." Intentional or not, the tones recall those of a child's music box, the plucked nature of which complements those bell-like timbres that ensue within “Visceral Sketch part II," immediately commencing in the wake of the former's less than three-minute duration. With the ...

Album Review

Matt Choboter: Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging

Read "Unburying, from Liminals, Emerging" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
July 31, 2024

More than just the title of this particular album, Unburying, From Liminals, Emerging, might well be a description of the process Matt Choboter has followed on his previous few records. Dating back to Anima Revisited (Songlines, 2021), then Sleep Inertia (ILK, 2022) and Postcards of Nostalgia (ILK, 2023), the Canadian pianist and composer has explored the realms of sleeping and dreaming through unconventional means of composing and playing on his own and with collaborating musicians. The metaphysical and ...

Multiple Reviews

Matt Choboter And Tania Giannouli: Pianistics

by Doug Collette
July 28, 2023

More than merely a study in contrasts, these recordings by Matt Choboter and Tania Giannouli are mirror images of each other. Both artists take markedly different approaches to illustrate the versatility of the three-hundred plus year old percussion instrument that is the piano. On the one hand, Giannouli's recording is the definition of bare-bones, at least on the surface. But as a composite of her alone in front of an audience, taken from multiple concerts, deep in the spirit of ...

Year in Review

Doug Collette's Best Jazz Albums Of 2022

by Doug Collette
December 17, 2022

Just the tip of the proverbial iceberg... in alphabetical order... Joey Alexander Origin Mack Avenue Records Will BernardPond Life Dreck to Disk Matt Choboter's Hypnopompia Sleep Inertia Songlines Recordings Goldings / Bernstein / StewartPerpetual Pendulum Smoke Sessions Records Gordon Grdina Oddly Enough: The Music of Tim Berne Attaboygirl Records

Album Review

Matt Choboter's Hypnopompia: Sleep Inertia

Read "Sleep Inertia" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
July 30, 2022

In keeping with its title, these eight tracks of just over fifty-minutes comprise a waking/sleeping dreamscape where conscious thoughts crystallize. then turn amorphous in an engrossing cyclical pattern. The fourteen or so minutes of the two-part “Converging Diverging" elucidate the most literal instrumental explication of the concept: replete with far too much ornate detail to fit the description of free jazz, the musicianship nevertheless radiates an abiding spontaneity with all instrumental commentary and elaboration/embellishment from around the quintet.Canadian ...