Matt Silver
Digital WriterMatt Silver is a journalist, commentator, and storyteller who’s been enamored with the concept of performance since his grandparents told him as a toddler that singing "Sunrise, Sunset" in rooms full of strangers was the cool thing to do.
In his writing—informed by backgrounds in law, reporting, and creative writing— he seeks to understand the indulgent, joy-enhancing, and therapeutic power of music within the context of our everyday lives and the challenges of our wider culture; he knows of no other artistic medium that speaks to, speaks for, and nourishes life’s panoply of emotional shades and colors to a similar extent. Why does music not just provide enjoyment but imbue us with purpose? Why, when awestruck by a piece of music, do you play it over and over again so as to hold onto that exalted feeling for just a moment longer? Wait, it can’t be just Matt who does that, right?
His love of jazz comes from his father, Ken, an accomplished clarinetist, bandleader, and educator, who's passed on his extensive knowledge of the Real Book and an abiding love for jazz tunes with Broadway origins.
Matt’s contributed regularly to WRTI's Arts Desk since 2018; his work has also appeared on NPR.org and public media platforms across the country, as well as in The Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia), Washington Jewish Week, Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, and The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle.
In addition to writing for WRTI's Arts Desk, Matt can frequently be found whistling Gershwin or Bernstein with gusto or trying to replicate the sounds of Stan Getz and Larry McKenna on his saxophone, which he's found is a good deal harder than it looks. He is a proud member of that group of hardy souls who got their start at WRTI hosting Jazz through the Night, and is the host emeritus of The Silver Standard, a weekly sports-talk program that aired on Philadelphia’s 610 ESPN.
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In her self-titled debut album, Samara Joy approaches tunes immortalized by Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Carmen McRae with such maturity and erudition, you wouldn't guess that she never really studied, or performed any of their repertoire, until she enrolled in SUNY Purchase’s jazz program just four years ago. -
Whether it’s hosting a jam session at Chris’ Jazz Café or winging up to the Village to play at Smalls until 2 AM before driving the 90 miles back down to Philly to teach the next day at Temple University, bassist Mike Boone doesn’t stop; he’s always playing, always teaching, and like every great bass player, always listening. -
The South Bronx Story is the third solo release from Carlos Henriquez, best known for his work over the past two decades as the principal bassist for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JALCO). JALCO’s maestro, jazz kingmaker Wynton Marsalis, plucked Henriquez for his septet shortly after the latter’s graduation from LaGuardia, New York City’s storied performing arts high school. -
America’s cultural divide has reached an inflection point, a time where society has no choice but to seriously reckon with issues of race, class, civil rights, opportunity, and dignity in a way it hasn’t since Nina Simone first sang protest songs. -
On Deciphering the Message, Chicago-based drummer, producer, and sound-engineering savant Makaya McCraven bends space/time in a way that takes one of music’s most intriguing hypotheticals and removes it from the realm of the speculative. -
Terence Blanchard became the first Black composer to premiere an original opera at The Metropolitan Opera in 2021. Fire Shut Up in My Bones—an adaptation of New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s bestselling memoir about childhood trauma and its layered emotional fallout—opened the Met’s 2021-2022 season. Hear it on WRTI, Saturday, January 8th at 1 PM. -
Multi-instrumentalist Joe Chambers made his name as a drummer on some of Blue Note Records’ most celebrated albums of the mid-to-late 1960s. But it’s his vibraphone playing here—bobbing and weaving in a synchronized courtship with pianist Brad Merritt worthy of David Attenborough narration—that’s foregrounded on Samba de Maracatu, his first release as a leader for the famed jazz label since 1998’s Mirrors. -
There is a space of time between sunset and the finality of night’s darkness where the diffusion of sunlight through the atmosphere and its dust serves as a stubborn and beautiful last gasp of day. It’s called twilight. -
I was 17 and the omnipresent song in America was "Don't Know Why," the hit single from Norah Jones' 2002 debut album, Come Away with Me. To this day, that record conjures senior year hangouts in friends’ basements and torturously long slow dances at the prom where I said “yes” to the wrong girl before I could summon the nerve to ask the right one. -
If there’s one thing that all the great jazz masters agree on, it’s that mimicry is not jazz, at least not good jazz. Maybe it’s part of the developmental process, but it’s the antithesis of what you strive to present to an audience. Saxophonist Mark Zaleski learned this almost as soon as he began studying at the Dave Brubeck Institute in California in the early 2000s
