Mat Muntz is a composer, bassist, bagpiper, and bandleader. Rooted in jazz improvisation and extending through microtonality, non-Western instrumentation, and experimental performance practice, Mat's work seeks to imbue the volatile and bizarre with an expressive, human immediacy. His music has been described by The Wire as “rare and rewarding,” and “with a weirdness which is positively thrilling,” and by The Guardian as “filled with a wild, distorted energy.”

Mat has performed across North America, Europe, and China at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Roulette, Blue Note Beijing, and the Umbria Jazz Festival. As a composer, he has written for ensembles including Yarn/Wire, soloists from South Korea’s National Gugak Orchestra, Del Sol Quartet, and Wet Ink, and is a co-leader of the cross-cultural experimental ensemble The Vex Collection with Vicente Atria. His debut album as a leader, Phantom Islands, was nominated for a 2024 German Jazz Prize for International Debut Album. Mat has won awards and commissions from Chamber Music America, New York State Council on the Arts, The Shed, and Brooklyn Arts Council, and in 2022 was invited to attend the International Gugak Workshop on Korean traditional music in Seoul. He holds degrees in Jazz Bass Performance from Manhattan School of Music (BM, 2016) and Music Composition from UC Berkeley (MA, 2024).

A polyglot approach is central to Mat’s work. His projects often veer wildly in style and method from one to the next; a just intonation string quartet based on a Balkan ghost story is followed by a cubist free jazz record, then a science fiction soundscape for Korean woodwinds and sine waves, then a bagpipe-powered maximalist studio creation, and so on. This trajectory is unified by a desire to find unlikely connections between disparate musical worlds, resulting in unconventional orchestrations and unexpected collaborations. Mat has been fortunate to perform and record with masters of various traditions, including Korean woodwind virtuosi like gamin, Kyu-Soo Lim, and Bo-Mi Kim, Czech pianist/microtonal harmonium specialist Miroslav Beinhauer, experimental bagpipers Matthew Welch and David Watson, avant-garde string stars Josh Modney, Mariel Roberts, Carrie Frey, and Adrianne Munden-Dixon, and cutting-edge improvisers including Myra Melford, Ben Goldberg, Scott Amendola, Anna Webber, Xavier Del Castillo, and Patrick Bartley, Jr., among others.

Since 2018, Mat has pioneered an experimental practice on the unique, hyper-regional Croatian bagpipe known as primorski meh. An ongoing exploration of the instrument’s unique intonational, timbral, and technical possibilities is documented in a growing body of solo, ensemble, and electroacoustic music. Mat’s research on the instrument has been presented at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Berkeley-Stanford New Yugoslav Studies Association, and published in Chanter, the journal of the International Bagpipe Society.