More than one artist with this name: 1. Matt Mitchell (also Matthew Mitchell) is a pianist and composer known for his work with Tim Berne, Dave Douglas, Mary Halvorson, Ches Smith, John Hollenbeck, Darius Jones, Dan Weiss, etc, part of the elite clique of musicians who straddle conservatory chops with avant-garde improvisation. As an outgrowth of his work as a faculty member of the Brooklyn-based Center for Improvisational Music and his collaborations with NYC improvisors, he first came to prominence as a member of some Tim Berne ensembles, notably including Snakeoil, who released albums on ECM in 2012 and 2013. The Berne/Mitchell synergy is widely seen as a new chapter in Berne's storied career of sequential reinvention. In 2013, Fiction, Mitchell's first major statement as a "leader" and composer-performer on piano was released on Pi Recordings, a 15 track opus of startlingly tense, kinetic, complex, uncategorizable music in tandem with drumkitter Ches Smith. Prior to his meteoric rise in the post-jazz scene he divided his time between piano and electroacoustic music inspired by the IDM and EAI scenes, documented on several minimally distributed recordings. The avant-prog scene is an additional specialty in his repertoire, accounting for some of his idiosyncratic aesthetics that are sharply different than other pianists in the jazz world. He was a part-time member of Thinking Plague between 1999 and 2004. He earned degrees in music from Indiana University and Eastman School of Music, and he was a Pew Fellow in 2012. 2. "Who is Matt Mitchell? For him the future is something to look forward to, not fear. He is a creative man of many interests: film, poetry, karate, music, dance. He is a man of passion and mystery. He is a man of lust. ...No, wait, that's Dirk Diggler. CRAP." <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Matt+Mitchell">Read more on Last.fm</a>. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.