The Music of
Matt Carmichael
by Howard Lawes
Heralded by BBC Music Magazine as "a distinctive new voice in a crowded scene," Scottish saxophonist and composer Matt Carmichael continues to go from strength to strength, further confirmed by his success at the 2025 Scottish Jazz Awards where his album, Dancing With Embers, won the best album prize.
Over a Zoom call Matt described his musical journey and hopes for the future.
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Matt was born just outside of Inverness, moving to Glasgow at the age of 5. His first musical instrument was the violin, but it was the saxophone which really fascinated him. He had never even seen a saxophone before but at the age of 11, following an aptitude test, he enthusiastically ran home from school clutching a letter from his local music service offering saxophone lessons. He was captivated by the shape and sound of the instrument and immediately began composing as well as performing. Matt was fortunate to have Allon Beauvoisin (founder member of the band Brass Jaw) as a teacher, who introduced him to jazz, but Matt found the likes of Charlie Parker and Michael Brecker a bit heavy going, preferring to improvise over blues and Scottish folk tunes.
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Further musical opportunities became available to Matt through the East Dunbartonshire School’s Jazz Orchestra, the National Youth Jazz Orchestra of Scotland and the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra, which he took full advantage of. At this stage he met pianist Fergus McCreadie, bass player, Ali Watson and drummer Tom Potter who became members of Matt’s band. He secured gigs at the Butterfly and Pig in Glasgow (even before half the band were legally allowed in the pub) and at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017.
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Here they are playing Matt's composition Kite in 2025:
In 2018 Matt enrolled on Professor Tommy Smith’s jazz course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS). During his time there Matt participated in a wide range of music, to the extent that he modified his style to incorporate elements of classical, traditional and folk melodies. In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, he was a finalist in the BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year playing to an empty hall (you will find a video of his performance on the site).
In his graduation years he bacame the first student to achieve a clean sweep of the three prizes awarded by the Jazz Department for composition, improvisation and arrangement and released his first album, Where Will the River Flow (2021) that garnered a 5-star review in the BBC Music Magazine. Such was the acclaim for the album that it prompted an invitation from GRAMMY Award-winning WDR Big Band to travel to Germany and be a guest soloist performing Bob Mintzer’s arrangements of his own music. In the same year he was nominated in three categories of the Scottish Jazz Awards.
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Here is Matt with the WDR Big Band and The Far Away Ones, a composition that would appear on Matt's 2022 album Marram :​
2022 saw Matt and his band, now including fiddle player Charlie Stewart, at the Love Supreme festival in Sussex and the release of his second album, Marram (2022), which was launched in Glasgow before being performed a week later at a sold-out Ronnie Scott’s in London. Marram is a dense, spiky grass that is a familiar sight on windswept coasts, and its matted roots help to stabilise sand dunes, allowing them to grow up and become colonised by other species. However, Matt emphasises that rather than his music being inspired by the Scottish coastline, which indeed he visited several times on family holidays, it’s more the other way round, the music coming first prompting images or subjects in the mind. In 2023 Matt played at Celtic Connections in Glasgow and at WOMEX in A Coruña, Spain, a city that also has Celtic connections. There was another visit to Ronnie Scott’s and Marram won best album at the Scottish Jazz Awards.
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Matt manages his career pretty much by himself so performing at Jazz Ahead 2024 was a great way to showcase his music to promoters from all over Europe. Back in Scotland he took part in the highly successful Scottish National Jazz Orchestra project called Nu Age Sounds – Planet World featuring eight of Scotlands most exciting young musicians. In 2025 he was able to learn more about the business side of being a professional musician when he was selected for Take 5, an annual talent development programme, run by Serious, dedicated to nurturing the careers of UK-based emerging jazz and improvising musicians and composers. This led to a performance at the 2025 EFG London Jazz Festival. There was also a further collaboration with the WDR Big Band and Bob Mintzer (here they are playing Kite) and the release of his third album Dancing With Embers (2025) featuring a band that now includes Innes White on guitar, Brìghde Chaimbeul on small pipes and Rachel Sermanni on vocals.
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Here is the album's title track Dancing With Embers :
​The larger band provides Matt with ever more scope for his beautiful melodies while the addition of small pipes (a bellows blown form of bagpipes) alongside the fiddle emphasises the Scottish folk music traditions that have inspired the music. Although the only track with a vocal is the haunting Mangata (a Swedish word describing the reflection of moonlight on water), most of the tracks have a song-like quality with Matt Carmichael’s saxophone providing the voice. It is very noticeable that many, young, Sottish jazz musicians celebrate the traditional music of their homeland and given the success of some other artists, such as Norwegian, Jan Gabarek, and the increasing popularity all Scottish music (e.g. Celtic Connections festival) there is every reason why they should. In fact, Matt was able to experience Norwegian jazz in Norway when he participated in the Erasmus student exchange scheme. The balance between folk and jazz on Dancing With Embers has a distinctive sound and long, complex bebop style solos are certainly absent, but Matt still counts John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Dexter Gordon and Ben Webster as his saxophone heroes. Other heroes include Martin Hayes, Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake alongside many of his contemporaries at RSC. The slow tunes on the album have all the haunting, melancholy of Sottish music while others are lively and energetic. Most of the band, despite the youth of its members, have been playing together for several years and skillfully cope with Carmichael’s mult-layered arrangements.
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Matt Carmichael has become the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's Ambassador for Jazz Saxophone and is enthusiastic about his alma mater - “RCS is an amazing hub for the creative scene in Glasgow and has been the catalyst for a lot of the most exciting music coming out of the city at the moment. It was a wonderful place to study at and be surrounded by so many inspiring people throughout my four years there. I continue to work with students, alumni and teachers from across the departments at RCS all the time and will do so for the rest of my career.”
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He feels strongly that music benefits the world by bringing people together, and that by improvising you can communicate with others to create an emotional response. Matt Carmichael is a remarkable, very talented, young musican who The Scotsman newspaper claimed ‘has developed an exciting Scottish style of his own.’ It is music that the whole world can enjoy and feel good about.
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Further information check out Matt's website here.
© Sandy Brown Jazz 2026.1