When Matt was in high school he remembers walking around on late nights during the Summer, sauntering through the New Hampshire (USA) country side, under a moon-lit sky with the smell of pine trees, cut grass, the sound of a gently babbling book showing up along his path. Occasionally, after returning from what we now call a nature bath, he would come upon a 1am radio show on National Public Radio called, “Music from the Hearts of Space” and become completely transfixed by the wild spaciousness delivered on the sonic vibrations of massive synth pads, beautiful merged string lines, subtle hand-percussion rhythms, perhaps a few spoken word snippets shining through a din of cavernous reverb. The tracks floating out of the radio that had a level of compositional adventure ignited a fire that would later propel Matt into exploring avant-garde classical composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok.

 

Since then, his musical path has taken him on a long and varied route, seeing him complete a masters degree in jazz piano, a stretch of time playing deep roots blues, southern rock and funk, then pursuing a calling to Afro-Cuban styles, then falling deeply for the music and life of Bob Marley (and nearly all the roots and branches of the reggae idiom), touring and recording with the jazz-fusion reggae band Groundation, leading his own reggae and Latin bands and becoming a professor of piano at Berklee College of music. (Read more about all of this here.)

 

Unmarked Routes is a radical departure from all that defined the middle part of his career, or, perhaps it’s more like a returning to that simple and organic experience of beauty and the sense of being touched by something deeply universal while wandering through the moon-lit forests and meadows of his childhood.

 

Most assuredly, a successful path through the human and planetary transition taking place will not come from division. Let’s tune into a hypnogogic state, the trippy place between wakefulness and sleep where immense feelings of awe, gratitude and connectedness can shine forth on a sonic bed of simple and direct universal beauty.