Matt Ridley and The Antidote

Jazz Hastings: Matt Ridley and The Antidote

Highly-praised double bass player and guitarist Matt Ridley will be appearing at the next monthly session of Jazz Hastings on Tuesday 4 April along with his band, The Antidote, whose music aims to bridge the divide between contemporary jazz, classical music and progressive rock. Julian Norridge writes.

As ever, the gig will take place at the East Hastings Sea Angling Association on the Stade.

Matt began his musical journey on piano aged six, gravitated to bass guitar in his mid-teens and began gigging professionally when he was 19. In 2001, he enrolled at Trinity College of Music and began learning the double bass, the instrument he used for his final recital before graduating with an honours degree in Jazz Studies and winning the Trinity College ‘Friends in New York” award.

Since then, he has performed internationally and at many of London’s most celebrated venues: the Purcell Room, Cadogan Hall, Ronnie Scott’s, King’s Place, the Barbican, the Union Chapel and the Brixton Academy.

As a band leader, Matt released his debut album Thymos in 2013, which was praised for showing compositional and improvisational ‘chutzpah’. His follow-up album Matta was released in February 2016. Building on the melodic, rhythmically inventive style of Thymos, the album received four-star reviews across the board. The quartet were hailed as “one of Britain’s very finest contemporary quartets”.

Matt is also a much in-demand sideman, known equally for his work with younger musicians on the contemporary jazz scene and with older, more established names, many of whom are well known to the Jazz Hastings audience, including Darius Brubeck (eldest son of Dave), Nikki Iles, Soweto Kinch, Jim Mullen, Gilad Atzmon and Hexagonal.

In 2019, Matt formed a new band, a quintet called The Antidote. Their eponymous album was released in 2021 to rave reviews. The CD was nominated for Best Album in the 2022 Parliamentary Jazz Awards.

Matt Ridley and The Antidote

The band features game-changing guitarist, Ant Law and brilliant saxophonist and composer, Alex Hitchcock, both luminaries of the young cutting-edge UK scene. Their collaborative album Same Moon in the Same World was released in November last year. They are joined by Tom Hewson on piano and Dave Hamblett on drums.

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