Bio:
Matt started his musical career at home under the tutelage of his father, an accomplished guitarist. While still a teenager, performing with multiple groups that included both his father and brother, Matt was immersed in the rock and blues traditions.
After finishing high school Matt was recruited by the U.S. Marine Corps as a guitarist. Four years later, after graduating from the Armed Forces School of Music and performing in hundreds of concerts, Matt headed to the University of Michigan School of Music.
While at Michigan, Matt performed with the University of Michigan Jazz Ensemble and appeared on William Bolcom’s 2005 GRAMMY Award winning album Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Matt graduated from the University of Michigan with highest honors.
Matt has spent several years in Washington, DC as a key player in the DC and Baltimore music communities, and as an accomplished guitar instructor at Levine Music. He freelances with diverse ensembles ranging from alt country and indie-rock outfits to jazz trios and the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra.
In 2013, Matt relocated to Los Angeles, California to study in the famed Studio/Jazz Guitar Program at the University of Southern California. He has earned a Master’s degree and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Thornton School of Music at USC. Matt is the 2018 outstanding doctoral graduate of the Thornton School of Music.
Matt recently returned to the Washington, DC area. He currently performs as a duo with his wife, Amy K Bormet. They explore an eclectic mix of songs from the Great American Songbook, MPB, country, R&B and popular songs as well as original material.
Matt’s latest project Beyond the Horizon is a 50-minute multimedia concert that imagines what it would be like to travel with the New Horizons spacecraft three billion miles to Pluto.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).