Matt Booth decided he was a bass player before he owned a bass. He was in middle school in Pittsburgh, and his friends wanted to start a rock band, and somebody had to hold the bottom, so he volunteered. He loved it immediately — the way the instrument lived in the foundation of everything, felt but not always heard, holding the architecture together while everyone else got to be the skyline. He played electric bass through high school and into college at Duquesne University, where he was earning the first of two music degrees, when he heard Charlie Haden playing upright on Ornette Coleman's Science Fiction. That was the turn. Haden's playing didn't announce itself — it moved underneath the music like a current, melodic and patient and completely essential. Booth picked up the upright and never looked back.
In Pittsburgh, he became the kind of musician a city builds around without quite noticing it's happening. He played in an Americana band, a David Lynch tribute act, a tango group, an Asian-jazz fusion ensemble — four wildly different worlds, each requiring a different version of the same instrument. He taught at Carnegie Mellon. He co-founded the Space Exchange, a weekly showcase for creative and improvised music that ran for five years and became one of the city's essential rooms. He freelanced with Sean Jones from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. He did everything a serious musician does in a mid-size city that respects its players, and then his friends and teachers started telling him the same thing: you should be in New Orleans.
He moved there around 2015, and the city absorbed him the way it absorbs anyone who shows up ready to work and willing to listen. Within a few years, Booth had become one of its most omnipresent bassists — co-leading the piano trio Extended with Oscar Rossignoli and Brad Webb, fronting his own quartet Palindromes with Brad Walker on saxophone, touring nationally with John "Papa" Gros, and appearing on bandstands at Snug Harbor, Tipitina's, and the Spotted Cat with a rotating cast that read like an index of the city's finest: Aurora Nealand, Irma Thomas, Johnny Vidacovich, Leo Nocentelli, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, Cyrille Aimée, Anders Osborne, Steve Masakowski. OffBeat Magazine nominated him twice for Best Bass Player. He played Jazz Fest, French Quarter Fest, Ottawa, Burlington, South by Southwest. The rooms kept getting bigger, and his approach stayed the same — serve the music, listen harder than you play, trust the people around you.
In 2023, Booth did something unexpected. He left New Orleans for Durham, North Carolina. But leaving a city doesn't mean leaving its musicians, and his debut album of original compositions, Sun Prints, released in 2024 on Ears & Eyes Records, was built from the relationships New Orleans gave him — Rossignoli on piano, Steve Lands on trumpet, Sam Taylor on tenor, Peter Varnado on drums, all of them players who had shaped the scene Booth helped sustain. The record moves from straight-ahead swing to funk to meditative ballad, spanning the same kind of ground Booth has always covered: everything, as long as it's honest. Charlie Haden is still in the DNA — the patience, the melodicism, the conviction that the bass is a voice, not just a pulse. But what Booth has built on that foundation is entirely his own: a career defined not by the spotlight he's stood in but by the rooms he's helped build and the musicians he's made better by standing next to them.