Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor is an AfroPnuematic composer, multi-instrumentalist, and improviser who has “…wrestled with the societal boundaries of Black artistry only to blast them apart…” (Dr. Kori Hill, I Care if You Listen) through creating music that is “insistent and defiant…envelopingly hypnotic” (Alan Young, Lucid Culture).

An artist at the intersection of concert music, free improvisation, and multi-disciplinary performance, Matthew has worked with many leading artists and ensembles including the Metropolis Ensemble, Turtle Island String Quartet featuring Cyrus Chestnut, Elliott Sharp, dancer Laurel Jenkins, and visual artist Dannielle Tegeder, in front of audiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the World Saxophone Congress 17, CineJazz Film Music Festival Paris, and the Perez Art Museum Miami.

A “risk taker” (Neil De La Flor, Huffington Post), Matthew’s latest work focuses on expression and liberation through breath. This music, AfroPneumaism, subverts Western aesthetics and philosophy by replacing chronometric and metronomic time with the human breath. Through this work, musicians are asked to listen inward as well as across the ensemble, as the audience joins in the collective act of deliberate breathing.

Matthew’s forthcoming album, Life Returns, will be released in May on Navona Records. He serves as Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of California, Berkeley.