Matthew Golombisky

Matthew Golombisky

Matthew Golombisky is an active bassist, composer, conductor, improviser, arranger, orchestrator, educator (IfCM, Hilldale School, SPACE), sound designer, stage manager/production (Pitchfork Music Festival, Hideout Block Party, The Swell Season, Peter, Bjørn & John), radio DJ/producer (WNUR 89.3FM) organizer and presenter. He currently lives in Oakland CA, but has been active in music, festival, and film scenes in Chicago, New Orleans, Buenos Aires, upstate NY and Asheville NC, where he lived, as well as toured the USA and Europe with bands such as IfCM, NOMO, Zing!, Jhelisa, GKduo, WATIV, QMRplus, more.

Matthew L. Golombisky was born and raised in Durham and Hillsborough, North Carolina. He started playing bugle and cornet at an early age. In middle school, he met an influential friend who sparked his interest in bass guitar, and in high school, played in the Honors Jazz Ensemble. There he formed the Orange High Jazz Combo, which is still going strong today.

After high school, Matthew attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville where he studied acoustic/electric bass performance, jazz, and classical music. At UNC-A, he became the music department’s hired music theory tutor. He graduated with the award of Distinction in Music in May 2001. He was also hired as an instructor and event organizer at The Asheville Music School where he taught private and group trumpet, bass, music theory and improvisation courses.

After graduation, he moved to New Orleans and quickly became a full-time working musician, eventually finding himself in twelve different groups at a time, several of which recorded full-length CDs and have played all over the US and Europe. At any given point, he had 30 private students, several of which were accepted to the prestigious New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), aged anywhere from 4 to 75 years old, studying piano, bass, guitar, theory, composition, and improvisation. He organized public concerts and recording sessions for many of his students.

In the spring of 2004, he started a Master’s program at the University of New Orleans (UNO) in Music Composition with Dr. Jerry Sieg. In August 2005, he was forced out of New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina, and currently resides in Chicago where he is a steadily performing bassist, working composer and educator, continuing to play with several groups from New Orleans as well as newly formed groups based in Chicago. In Chicago, he has put together a large ensemble consisting of over twenty performers, playing all-original and freshly composed music called the Tomorrow Music Orchestra. Since its conception, they have released two CDs, Live @ Ice Factory and neon jesus garage. He attended Northwestern in the fall of 2005 and completed his Master's of Music in Composition from UNO in May 2006.

He also directs the community collective known as ears&eyes, which “represents” bands such as Silences Sumire, Maurice, Box 3, Zing!, Pedway, James Davis Quintet, Algernon, among others and curates an annual music/arts/film festival under the same name.

In addition to performing, Matthew is also an avid cryptozoologist. He believes that the Bigfoot likes music and carries his bass into the woods with him in hopes to lure it out of hiding.

Golombisky's “Determining What’s Next”, a slow movement for chamber orchestra, was premiered in Innsbruck, Austria in November 2005, performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2006 with the Lucky 7s, curated the now annual music/film/arts festival, ears&eyes, and is the director of the collective music community, ears&eyes Records.

He shortly after moved to Argentina and found the love of his life. It was by both chance and luck on both their parts that they met. Matthew loves animals and is a fairly skilled horse wrangler. While in Argentina he regularly left civilization to ride wild horses bareback. One day while doing this he saw a beautiful woman who was riding in a carriage being pulled by two spooked and uncontrollable horses. Matt was able to control his still unbroken horse enough to rescue the woman before the carriage crashed and overturned. The two have been inseparable since.

In the year of 2011 Matthew joined the band Animal Pants and became their new bass player. They came out with one CD and are now working on their next one, which hopefully will come out by the end of 2012.

Recently we found out that Matthew Golombisky also has what we like to call spider-man powers. He has the ability to climb walls with no gear whatsoever. Scientists researched these "powers" and came to the conclusion that he has superhuman strength because of his awesomeness and badassness. It is indeed rare but what happens is the human body can only handle a specific amount of awesomeness, when it has more than it can handle it needs a way to release some of it or else it could be deathly. So in special cases like Matthew's the body starts changing, becoming stronger and starts developing what we call superhuman powers.