Matt Mitchell

Matt Mitchell is a pianist and composer interested in the intersections of various strains of acoustic, electric, composed, and improvised new music. He currently composes for and leads several ensembles featuring many of the current foremost musicians and improvisers, including Tim Berne, Kim Cass, Kate Gentile, Ben Gerstein, Jon Irabagon, Travis Laplante, Ava Mendoza, Miles Okazaki, Ches Smith, Chris Speed, Tyshawn Sorey, Chris Tordini, Anna Webber, Dan Weiss. He is an anchor member of several significant creative music ensembles which integrate composed and improvised music, including Tim Berne’s Snakeoil, the Dave Douglas Quintet, John Hollenbeck’s Large Ensemble, Dan Weiss’s Starebaby, Jonathan Finlayson’s Sicilian Defense, Steve Coleman’s Natal Eclipse, Kate Gentile’s Mannequins, Mario Pavone’s Blue Dialect Trio, Anna Webber’s Simple Trio, Ches Smith’s We All Break, the Dave King Trio, and Quinsin Nachoff’s Flux. He is also among the core performers of John Zorn’s Bagatelles.

Musicians with whom he performs and has performed include Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Bird Calls, the Darius Jones Quartet, Jon Irabagon, Michael Attias’ Spun Tree, Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth, John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet + 1, Ohad Talmor’s Grand Ensemble, JD Allen, Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green’s Apex, Rez Abbasi’s Invocation, Lee Konitz, Kenny Wheeler, Ralph Alessi’s Baida Quartet, Dave King’s Indelicate duo, Amir ElSaffar, Marc Ducret, David Torn, Vernon Reid, Clarence Penn and Penn Station, Linda Oh, Rudy Royston, Allison Miller, Donny McCaslin, Brad Shepik, and Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society.

He has taught extensively with the Brooklyn-based School for Improvisational Music, as well as at the New School, NYU, and the Siena Jazz Workshop. He is also a 2015 receipient of a Doris Duke Impact Award and a 2012 recipient of a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

Ingrid Laubrock: Purposing the Air

Read "Purposing the Air" reviewed by Vincenzo Roggero

by Vincenzo Roggero
July 29, 2025

Avventuroso e ambizioso Purposing the Air, nuovo progetto di Ingrid Laubrock, notevole sassofonista di origini tedesche qui nelle vesti di compositrice. Dal poema “Mood Librarian -a poem in koan" di Erica Hunt, ha estratto sessanta frammenti, trenta nel primo CD e trenta nel secondo, affidandoli a quattro duo dove l'elemento fisso è la voce mentre la strumentazione si distribuisce tra violoncello, pianoforte, chitarra elettrica e violino. I sessanta frammenti-miniature-koan, alcuni di due sole parole, riportati nel dettagliato libretto interno, risuonano ...

Album Review

Jon Irabagon: Server Farm

Read "Server Farm" reviewed by Vincenzo Roggero

by Vincenzo Roggero
April 21, 2025

Quando un agitatore musicale come Jon Irabagon, mente tra le più aperte, corrosive, imprevedibili e significative della scena jazzistica statunitense mette insieme un tentetto da paura per esplorare fatti e misfatti dell'intelligenza artificiale, curiosità e aspettative sono ai massimi livelli. E questo Server Farm le soddisfa pienamente, ennesima prova della grandezza di un musicista onnivoro in grado di esaltare ed esaltarsi in tutta la gamma di formazioni messe in campo negli ultimi quindici anni. Dal sax solo di ...

Album Review

Ingrid Laubrock: Purposing The Air

Read "Purposing The Air" reviewed by Thierry De Clemensat

by Thierry De Clemensat
April 13, 2025

Purposing The Air is a recording of extreme quality, though it is undoubtedly aimed at an informed audience, one more inclined toward contemporary classical music. While some pieces carry faint echoes of jazz, listening to this album is akin to stepping into a museum to attend a recital. Each artist is striving for excellence on every level: musicality, interpretation and even theatricality. It is, without a doubt, a powerful creation. To fully grasp the artistic approach behind this ...

Album Review

Jon Irabagon: Server Farm

Read "Server Farm" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
March 7, 2025

Artificial Intelligence would have a hard job pinning down saxophonist Jon Irabagon's defining characteristics. When a player is as talented as Irabagon, who can turn his hand to almost any style, sometimes the challenge is to find a focus that stimulates. On Server Farm, Irabagon has taken the notion of AI and the ever increasing prevalence of the digital world as his casus belli. Not that he uses AI himself in composing the album, rather as the PR reveals, he ...

Album Review

Jon Irabagon: Server Farm

Read "Server Farm" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
February 28, 2025

"The times they are a-changin.'" Bob Dylan said that in 1964. He was right. In 2025, they are still changing, perhaps most notably with the emergence of artificial intelligence. That previously slow creep--outlined so accurately in Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, paired with Stanely Kubrick's movie of the same name--will build to a tipping point leading to an implosion. The takeover is inevitable. The only way to address it is through the arts. This is ...

Album Review

Jon Irabagon: Server Farm

Read "Server Farm" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
February 19, 2025

Warning! Warning! Heads up! Spoiler alert! Server Farm has the potential to take your head to some random places. Some alarming (as all artists should be these days), Some cacophonous. Some claustrophobic. Others freeing, fleeting, fervent. Server Farm, saxophonist/composer Jon Irabagon's heatedly precise and prescient head-on clash with the threat of AI blisters the binary codes and algorithms of the connected world (which makes us all individual heads of the Hydra) both surgically and haphazardly, letting it all ...

Liner Notes

Dustin Carlson: Air Ceremony

by Dustin Carlson
January 28, 2025

Dream-time, work-time, play-time, ceremony-time, time counted and time uncountable... Time like a desert with sinuous lines unbroken; like a forest with trees that mark space, territory, barlines; or Time like an exit ramp, a cloverleaf highway interchange with its traffic, speed shifts, and the roar of engines... The time it takes a fern to grow, an egg to dry, a bullet to fire, a shoreline to erode ... or a body to touch the ground after a leap; or a ...

Event

Matt Mitchell Kicks Off Elysium Furnace Works' 2019 Season In Beacon, NY

Source: James Keepnews
February 21, 2019

The 2019 season for the Hudson Valley music series Elysium Furnace Works promises to be its most exciting yet. EFW is proud to launch this year's slate of concerts with one of the most remarkable and cutting-edge pianists and composers, Matt Mitchell. Hailed as “a pianist of burrowing focus and an indispensable fixture of the contemporary vanguard” by The New York Times, “smart and dazzling” by Philadelphia Magazine and “compelling, even startling two-handed abandon” by the Detroit Free Press, Matt ...
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Contest

Enter the "Matt Mitchell - Fiction" Giveaway at All About Jazz!

Source: All About Jazz
September 30, 2013

All About Jazz members are invited to enter the Pi Recordings “Matt Mitchell - Fiction“ giveaway contest starting today. We'll select FIVE winners at the conclusion of the contest on October 28th. Click here to enter the contest

(Becoming a fan of Matt Mitchell at AAJ automatically enters you in the contest.)

Good luck! Your Friends at Pi Recordings About Fiction

Fiction is the highly anticipated debut recording from Matt Mitchell, one of the most in-demand pianists in ...
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